


Unrepentant

by squire



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Angst, Canon Divergence, Definitely Happy Ending, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Eventual Happy Ending, F/M, First Kiss, Heartbreak, Hurt/Comfort, Jealous John, Jealousy, M/M, Major Character Injury, More tags to be added, Relationship Development, Relationship Negotiation, Revenge, Season Three AU, Unresolved Romantic Tension, references to past torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-21
Updated: 2014-10-22
Packaged: 2018-02-14 03:44:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 10
Words: 36,051
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2176728
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/squire/pseuds/squire
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sherlock comes back from the dead, and he's not sorry.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Hurt is a Hungry God

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Ariane_DeVere](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ariane_DeVere/gifts).



> This story just wouldn't let me go. Call it a delayed shock caused by Series three, I suppose. 
> 
> It follows loosely my one-shot [Machine: Epiphany](http://archiveofourown.org/works/2036640) \- not exactly in terms of timeline, but in terms of Sherlock's reasoning. It isn't necessary to read it first, but it might help you understand his POV. 
> 
> Beta'ed, vastly improved, and essentialy held together by the amazing Ariane De Vere. 
> 
> Now translated into Slovak! Thanks to the amazing venomPunk [ you can read it here ](http://archiveofourown.org/works/11052678/chapters/24641430).

Sherlock comes back from the dead, reveals himself to John, says sorry – well, after he realises that John is not taking the news in the same lighthearted manner in which it was delivered – and is thrown on the floor and half-strangled. 

He explains – well, tries to – why he had to go away, and is punched in the face. 

Explanations seem to have the same effect as apologies; that is, none whatsoever. The past is in the past, they say, so perhaps focusing on the future will help matters along. Sherlock invites John on his case and gets a bloody nose. 

“John, I want to apologise–” 

“Fuck off.” 

“John, I’d like to–” 

“Stop calling me and fuck off.” 

Eventually, Sherlock stops calling John, no matter how Mrs. Hudson insists that he should. There are little cases, satisfyingly intricate and obscure, to keep him occupied while he lies low and waits for the rats to move on the one big case for Mycroft. The empty half of the flat hurts, but the pain is so small and so steady that he can ignore it if he wants to: it’s not worse than the inexplicable feeling of void he lived with for the past two years, and he’s already got used to that. It’s true he didn’t expect it to continue even after his return – but it’s also true that he didn’t know what to expect from his return in the first place. Getting back to things as they were? 

 _Seriously, Sherlock?How much more of an idiot can you be?_  

Slotting seamlessly back into his old life, into his shared flat, with his friend– 

_What friend?John Watson has moved on with his life._

 

*

 

There’s John standing in the middle of the living room of 221B, hunching his shoulders and shifting his feet as if he doesn’t belong to this place any more– oh yes, he doesn’t. He chose not to. Sherlock finally closes the door after his fussing mother. 

“Did they know, too?” 

Sherlock doesn’t want to talk about this again. What more can he do than apologise and what more will John do than get angry? It’s not as if he tried to understand, even once. John doesn’t want to understand. On the contrary, he clearly wants Sherlock to understand something else, and Sherlock has no idea what that is. 

“That you spent the last two years playing hide and seek.” 

 _Hide? Yes_ , Sherlock thinks absently. _Seek? Not so much. Were you looking for me? Would you have looked for me?_  

John is clearly waiting for an answer, for another reason to get angry. For another confirmation of his belief of how much he didn’t matter, less than Mycroft, less than Molly Hooper, less than the homeless network. For another opportunity not to relent, not to soften towards forgiveness, for another piece of the barricade he’s building between them. “Maybe.” 

“Ah! So that’s why they weren’t at the funeral.” 

“Sorry, sorry _again_!” Sherlock throws up his arms. What more does John expect? Sherlock can’t turn back time, and even if he could, he wouldn’t. He doesn’t even understand why he should be sorry, he can see it’s expected of him but _why_? Everyone keeps saying that John has every right to be angry with him but Sherlock simply doesn’t see why. Sherlock did what had to be done. He acted in John’s best interest. 

John makes a move for the door. Cold November light filters through the curtains and adds years to the face Sherlock once knew so well that he could draw it with his eyes closed. The hideous moustache is gone but the layer of ancientness somehow remains, the bags under John’s eyes heavier, skin tone greyer, the light in his eyes duller. His temple and the side of one cheek are scratched from the bonfire, and his whole face looks swollen, badly fitting, less expressive, like a mask. 

Sherlock watches him and draws a breath, searching for words that will have the power to redeem him, but there are none. None other than Sorry, Sorry again, only ever Sorry, and suddenly Sherlock can see a future cracking open in front of his mind’s eye, a narrow slice of a life where he accepts the blame without really understanding it. A future filled with apologies, with tokens of penance, of altering his personality, becoming softer, more vulnerable, more _human,_ his spine crippling under the weight of paying attention to other people’s feelings. Every day another instalment of a debt which can never be paid off, endless atonement of this one mistake, and for what? For crumbs of the life he expected to get back in full. 

Because John is already half gone. Sherlock _did_ notice that he was about to propose to Mary when he interrupted their dinner, and Sherlock can see himself being guilted into attending his wedding, _what a horrible idea_ , so many people, and perhaps even giving a speech in which he will apologise again, because that’s apparently a sign of being a good man. And John will accept all that as his due, because Sherlock has hurt him once and so now it’s his _duty_ to make him happy forever. All that dedication, all that devotion, and John will never see it as a gift but only as a repayment, he will never really let go of his hurt, feeding on the apologies like a hungry pagan god feeds on the smell of the offerings, never sated, never content. 

Sherlock doesn’t know if he deserves anything, but he’s sure he doesn’t deserve _this_. 

“In fact, I am not sorry.” 

The sarcastic grimace on John’s face freezes. 

“Taking down Moriarty’s network was a job for which I was the most suited. I did what I had to do in order to succeed. It was an operation, not an adventure. You may be used to war but you aren’t a trained MI6 operative, you don’t know a thing about undercover missions, you would do me no good out there. Securing your safety by leaving you ignorant of the plan was part of it, and seeing as you were targeted and almost killed barely a week after I returned from the dead, it was not a superfluous measure. I rid both England and several other countries of a number of bad people, I may have saved the lives of people I shall never know, and you are alive and well. I shall never be sorry for that.” 

For the little fraction of time it takes for the light to crawl through the dusty window and land softly on another layer of dust on the shelves across the room, John just stands there, eyes scrunched tight, colour rising on his face, nails digging into his palms– 

–then Sherlock is slammed against the fireplace wall, the mantelpiece digging painfully into his back, into the worst gashes where he’s still not done healing, and John has one hand fisted in his collar and the fingers of the other clawing into a fat welt that runs over Sherlock’s shoulder as he grips him, _hard_ , and the pain flares up so bright that Sherlock doesn’t even feel that John is shaking him, shaking him like a rag doll against the mantelpiece, and John is going to hit him and tell him to fuck off and it’s okay because this time it won’t be for trying to be nice, this time it won’t be for trying to say sorry.

 

*

 

The fabric of Sherlock’s shirt is solid and real under John’s fingers, various things are falling off the mantelpiece and scattering and rolling away on the hearth rug, and John wants to shake some sense into that bastard, into that fool who thinks that John is _alive_ and _well_ because of _him_ – 

“Go ahead, hit me.” 

Sherlock’s voice is flat, as if he doesn’t care, as if he’s bored, and the only reason John doesn’t hit him right there and then is that he’s not sure if he would ever be able to stop. 

“I wish…” he gets through gritted teeth instead and pushes Sherlock harder into the mantelpiece, “I wish there was a way… to make you feel what I felt. All that needless pain. Because hitting you? That doesn’t even come close.” 

He shoves again, head bowed, like a bull ramming into a fence, and laughs into his own jacket. “I wish you had a bloody _idea_ about how it can hurt.” 

John breathes in, out, in. The red dots in his vision disappear, one at a time, and at last he can focus again. He notices Sherlock’s arms: held stiffly at his sides, white knuckles on balled fists. Sherlock is not fighting back, he’s not even trying to make John stop. 

It’s odd. Why isn’t he fighting back? 

John lifts his head and squints at Sherlock’s face, half expecting to find the familiar, haughty, bored expression to match the tone of voice from before. But there is– 

Sherlock’s eyes are tightly closed, there are little wrinkles around the corners of his eyes and a tiny double line between his eyebrows. There are sunken shadows beneath his eyes, and his lips look thinner because he’s pressing them together. John blinks and blinks again. He knows this expression. He’s seen it a thousand times, in various forms and permutations, in his waiting room. Migraine, arthritis, menstrual cramps. It’s the face of a person in pain. 

He abruptly lets go, hands falling uselessly. “I didn’t hit you _that_ hard.” 

He watches as Sherlock peels himself off the mantelpiece and straightens, and this time he doesn’t miss the wince Sherlock fails to suppress.  

“What’s wrong?” 

“It’s nothing.” 

But John is really looking this time, really listening, and he realises that the voice is not flat with boredom. It’s purposefully toneless to keep out any breaking of tone, any slight hiss on the intake of breath. 

John observes. The way Sherlock holds his head, the line of his shoulders as he takes a few steps away from him, closer to the window. 

“Sherlock, what happened to your back?” 

There is a momentary flicker in Sherlock’s face, something uncertain, the same second of distant calculation John saw just a moment before Sherlock said that he was _not_ sorry. Then Sherlock lifts his chin. 

“I’ve been caught, imprisoned and interrogated a couple of times, usually on purpose. Last time, in Serbia, Mycroft interrupted the proceedings prematurely in order to get me to London to solve a threat of terrorism. My back hasn’t had time to heal.” 

John feels the blood drain from his heart. “Interrogated. You mean…” 

Sherlock laughs. It isn’t a merry sound. “They weren’t particularly imaginative. And I made sure to get out before they started breaking bones.” 

The room is suddenly so very cold. Out of the corners of his eyes, John sees his hands shaking, but he cannot feel them. He opens his mouth for breath, but the air doesn’t seem to reach his lungs. His heart constricts around a sudden emptiness, all his blood frozen somewhere in his legs, heavy as stone. He watches and observes and wishes he could just bloody stop, stop seeing what he sees, but the diagnostic part of his brain has finally caught up with him and it’s making up for the time lost, presenting him the facts with raw, brutal honesty. 

He observes the way Sherlock keeps circling the room as he speaks, wandering in a seemingly mindless pattern but in fact never really turning his back on John, and when he stops, it’s only in such places where John won’t be in the way between him and the nearest escape route. He observes Sherlock’s gestures, his body language – God, this man used to be so eloquent in his gestures, grandeur and flourish in every move, and now he’s almost mute in comparison, closed-off and guarded. 

John has seen these silenced bodies before, these strange dances designed to keep people at bay and always, always to stay close to the door. He used to meet them outside the group therapy rooms at the clinic where Ella Thompson works. Victims of violent assault. Victims of… John’s mind recoils from any further thought. 

Regret stings like a loop of barbed wire around his throat, self-reproach cuts like broken glass between his teeth. Somehow, by some fucking miracle, John forces his feet to carry him into the bathroom so that he won’t throw up on the living room floor.

 

*

 

Sherlock swallows as he listens to the sounds of retching from the bathroom and feels a little sick himself. His eyes sting and he swallows again. He tastes salt. Interesting. 

He miscalculated. He shouldn’t have told John about his injuries. He’s still not sure why he did tell him; an effort to honour John’s wish for honesty? Or a misjudged act of spite, a slap in the face for the _hide and seek_ jibe? 

It doesn’t matter. He should have predicted that John’s reaction would be unpleasant. Is it any wonder? John has always – well, at least before Sherlock jumped – seen him as something otherworldly, brilliant, perhaps incomprehensible, but definitely indestructible. But now Sherlock bears physical marks that prove he failed, that he wasn’t always in the position of power, that there was a time when he was at the mercy of nameless sadists who made him _scream_ , and these marks won’t ever go away, he’ll be forever carrying their signature, a visible reminder of his humiliation.  

Sherlock remembers what one of the gun sellers back there, somewhere in Ukraine, told him during one of their sessions – _Torture dehumanizes. Tomorrow you’ll look in a mirror and see nothing but me, and some_ _day your friends will look at you and see nothing but a pitiful, off-putting thing._   

The look of disgust on John’s face before he ran away was clear enough. 

Sherlock doesn’t wait to see it again.

 

*

 

When John first went to visit Harry after his discharge from the hospital, he was a decorated war hero, he no longer needed to keep his arm in a sling and he couldn’t take a step without the bloody cane; and the first thing Harry did upon seeing him was slap him across the face. 

She didn’t apologise even after she’d had time to think about it. “You deserved it, Johnny. You’re the only one left, after Dad’s–  you’re the only one I’ve got now, and you can’t just– you _can’t_. Don’t you understand?” 

He did understand. But that didn’t make the slap any less wrong. 

Now John stands in front of the sink in 221B’s bathroom and doesn’t dare to meet his own eyes in the mirror. 

_You’ve attacked, punched, thrown on the floor, a man returned from–_

_You’ve intimidated and traumatised a–_

_A war veteran._

Sherlock has no medals for bravery under fire. He doesn’t need a cane. His spine carriage is as proud as ever. But that doesn’t make his battle scars any less real. 

 _Game of hide and seek._ The worst thing is that for Sherlock it probably was a game, a game of wits, his only reward being the secret knowledge that he’s won. The public will never acclaim his taking down a criminal network whose existence wasn’t known to them in the first place. 

But John knows that no matter how well suited for danger you are, the war always gets under your skin. You can be cheerful and above-it-all during the day but the nightmares come after nightfall, sucking the life out of you. It was not the battlefield of London where Sherlock spent those two years, not the stage of their crazy adventures. It’s different when you’re risking your life in a city where the ambulance will always arrive in time to save a life, and when you’re in a foreign country, undercover, on your own... 

John shudders when he recalls the way Sherlock was speaking about his... interrogations. As if it was a... _routine_. He imagines himself alongside Sherlock in whatever trap they fell into, some criminals catching them both and using one of them as leverage so the other would talk. 

 _You would do me no good out there_. 

John touches the scratches around his eye and a hazy memory floats up from the buzz of emotions in his head – the expression of relief on Sherlock’s face when John was dragged out of the bonfire. The drugs blurred his sense of time and place, he doesn’t really remember how he got out, but he remembers that Sherlock was there. Even though the last thing John told him was to fuck off. 

John hopes there’s a way to take it back. The fact that Sherlock made him watch his own faked suicide and didn’t see fit to let him in on the secret for two years is still a poisoned sting wedged in his heart but he can see to it later, when he sorts out the mess he’s made out of Sherlock’s return. He splashes his face with cold water and goes back to the living room. 

Sherlock is nowhere in the flat.

 

*

 

_–We need to talk. J_

_..._

“Sherlock, it’s me. Would you pick up your bloody phone?” 

... 

_–Just let me make this right. Please. J_

_–You did nothing wrong, John. I understand completely. SH_

“Like hell you do,” John growls, and dials again, but the number is no longer available.

 

*

 

Sherlock deduces the existence of the forgotten Underground station and disappears into the tunnels, alone. He finds the missing carriage and discovers the bomb. The clock’s ticking down, Sherlock watches the numbers go backwards, and for a moment he thinks how easy it would be to end like this. Ignore the off-switch and burn. His heart has been burnt out anyway, two years ago. 

He wonders, if John had come down here with him, whether he would have forgiven him before they died together. Good man John with his belief in God, he would want to step before the face of the Almighty without any burdens on his conscience. Sherlock could make it easy for him. Get down on his knees, soak his voice with fake tears. Of course John would forgive him.

But it wouldn’t change anything. Sherlock would still be an unwanted misfit, an item buried and mourned over long ago, a dinosaur who survived his own extinction frozen under ice while the rest of the world changed around him. John has moved on with his life, he’s got a fiancée and a future, a future that doesn’t account for Sherlock in it. 

At last, one number on the display catches his attention and Sherlock stops the count-down. The digits freeze for a moment, one minute and twenty-nine seconds to go. 1:29. Sherlock scoffs at himself. Sentiment. 

As if the bomb didn’t want to give up, the numbers keep flickering – the programming battling with the off-switch. 

1:28. 1:29. 1:28. 1:29 again. 

January the 29th, the day he met John. 

January the 28th, no John in his life. 

Sherlock wishes he’d stopped the clock a second later.  

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>   
>  "Sherlock doesn’t know if he deserves anything, but he’s sure he doesn’t deserve _this._ "


	2. Landmark Hotel: Take Two

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Mary tries her best.

Sherlock Holmes thwarts the attempt at reliving Guy Fawkes’ legacy, discloses the Underground spy network and generally saves the day. Once again, the detective is the toast of the news, the press hyenas vying with each other for the most bootlicking interview, and the room at New Scotland Yard where an official press conference is held is full to bursting.  
  
John reads about it in the papers.  
  
It takes the journalists two days to ferret out John’s workplace. Another two days before every last one of them comes to realise that  _No Comment_ is the only answer they’re going to get.  
  
Precisely speaking, every last one but for one exception. She has the nerve to wait for John outside his own flat as he gets home from work and John barely recognises her at first. It’s the affected tone in that vexatious voice that finally sets him on the right track.  
  
“Miss Riley. How do you get a skin that thick?”  
  
“It’s Mrs. Davids, actually.” As she steps into the middle of the pavement, John can see she’s pregnant. It’s just starting to show.  
  
“Congratulations, I suppose.”  
  
“It’s been two years. People change.”  
  
“Don’t I know it,” John mutters and tries to side-step her. Either he’s too polite or she’s too quick.  
  
“What about you, Doctor Watson? Where is the Bachelor to the Boffin? That sweet Doctor Hooper is hardly cutting it. Have you read about that press conference? It was very enlightening.”  
  
John presses his lips into a thin line. Of course he’s read about the press conference. About the long-range plan to take down Moriarty, about the fabricated information they fed to the consulting criminal that he would use to destroy Sherlock’s reputation; a plan that had counted on Sherlock disappearing and going underground from the very start – except that Moriarty had flashed his last trump card on Bart’s roof, three gunmen trained on three victims, forcing Sherlock to fake his suicide exactly the way it happened.  
  
John finally manages to get past the journalist without bumping into her too roughly and takes out his keys.  
  
“He used you,” she calls after him. “Just like he used me.”  
  
John freezes. There is no way he could fit the key into the lock at the first try. He clutches the key ring, blades digging into his palm to prevent the keys from jingling. He presses his elbow to his side, hoping that the journalist won’t see his hands shaking. Kitty’s voice behind him is barely raised but he hears her all too well.  
  
“Would you believe me if I told you… Sometimes, during those two years, I would… regret. That I didn’t check on Richard… on Moriarty. That I snatched the opportunity to hit the front page and didn’t think twice. That I could have contributed to his decision to… jump.” She laughs. It reminds John of the clattering sound of ice cubes in a thin glass. “I bet he didn’t think of me even once during those two years.”  
  
Finally, John manages to open the door. He closes it behind him without a word. Mrs. Davids wasn’t waiting for them anyway, as it seems.  
  
After dinner, he spends a good hour sitting in front of his computer, staring at the editing interface of his blog. When the solitary black cursor on the blaring screen threatens to etch a permanent image onto his retinas, he posts a short notice about his engagement.  
  
He disables the comments two hours later. They’re all asking about Sherlock.  
  
“You should delete the whole post,” Mary says, eyes barely lifted from her iPad. She looks like a schoolgirl engrossed in that adventure book with broomsticks and magical wands, and the empty half of the bed next to her looks so damn inviting.  
  
“It’s my blog. I should be entitled to post what I want.” He stretches his back and checks his phone for what feels like the thousandth time today. No new messages. This is another thing he’s going to see when he closes his eyes today:  _no new messages._  
  
“It’s a blog  _you_ ’ve been writing – about Sherlock and nothing else ever.”  
  
“Well, not–”  _any more_ , “–not now.”  
  
“Even when he was dead. Posts recounting old adventures and gushing about an old birthday message.”  
  
“Are you reading it again?”  
  
Mary grins and hops off the bed, rubbing her elbows. “The best thing about it is the comments,” she remarks.  
  
John deletes the post and goes to take a shower.  
  
There’s a steaming cup of chamomile and lemon balm tea on his bedside table when he returns to the bedroom. John stares at it and wonders when simple tokens of gentle care and unobtrusive perceptiveness began to deserve being thrown at the wall. Dear, sweet Mary. As if a cup of bloody tea could be the cure to his sleepless nights.  
  


*

  
  
Sherlock is halfway through the pile of cold cases that Lestrade had dropped off earlier this week, partly a reconciliation gesture, partly a genuine eagerness to make use of Sherlock’s return – the murder solving rate dropped slightly but still distinctly in the past two years – when there’s a knock on the house door, followed by Mrs. Hudson’s muttering as she answers it. It’s too late for a client, though, and the melody of the landlady’s chirping rises up about a minor third which indicates she’s on cordial terms with the visitor–  
  
Sherlock is in the kitchen in three steps and actually sitting down behind his microscope when he realises that the tread of the visitor’s steps on the stairs is too light.  
  
“Sherlock?” She came in through the living room door; it takes her a moment to spot him. About the moment Sherlock needs to tamp down on that sudden riot of panic, followed by an unexpected cold douse of disappointment, and lock them both behind a smooth, marble façade.   
  
“Hello, Mary. Sorry, I’m busy,” he fires off monotonously, eyes glued to the microscope.  
  
“It would be more believable if there was a sample on that thing,” she says as she points to the empty sample holder.  
  
Sherlock briefly closes his eyes, a minute acknowledgement of defeat. He has forgotten that John’s girlfriend is not John himself when it comes to the skills of observation.  
  
Mary takes off her red jacket and settles on a kitchen chair.  
  
“Look, I said I’d talk him around.”  
  
“You did that.”  
  
She taps her fingers on her wrist. “Hardly my fault that they picked him off the street to be roasted alive, right when he finally decided to give in. And I have no idea what went wrong afterwards. We – you saved his life, for God’s sake!”  
  
“Isn’t it getting tiresome, this negotiating business?” Sherlock opens a box of clean slides and digs around for a scalpel.  
  
“John doesn’t know I’m here.”  
  
“Then why are you here?” The sample bag with wool threads from the last file is still on the coffee table in the living room. Damn.  
  
“Sherlock, stop sodding around and listen, because I’m going to say this just once.”  
  
He wrinkles his nose but doesn’t cut her off. In a world where people divide into enemies, allies and bystanders, Mary is not a bystander. Sherlock is not sure which one of the other two options she is. Better let her talk.  
  
“You didn’t see John when I met him. You didn’t see what you did to him. It’s been months of picking up the pieces for me, and I’m not going to stand by and watch him falling apart at the seams all over again.”  
  
“Why would he do that?” It should have been a disdainful, rhetorical question, but somehow it emerged like a nestling from a cracked egg, guileless and frail.  
  
Mary leans back on her chair and shakes her head. “Just – talk to him. Let him in.”  
  
“Would you pass me the small plastic bag on the coffee table? The one with the red tape.”  
  
Mary stares at the ceiling for a while, visibly calming herself.  
  
“Okay,” she breathes out. “The hard way, then. The restaurant in the Landmark Hotel, this Friday, six o’clock sharp. You  _will_  be there.”  
  
“Will I?” Sherlock aims for amused but again it emerges on the wrong side of interested. Mary doesn’t miss it. There’s a small smile playing around the corners of her mouth.  
  
“You will. And don’t mess it up this time.”  
  
Sherlock regards her silently for a couple of minutes. Mary seems unbothered by the scrutiny. Could she really be so selfless? Putting John’s well-being above hers? Sherlock gets up abruptly and picks up the sample bag from the coffee table. Observes her from the corner of his eye. She’s remarkably unreadable.  
  
“Why are you doing this, Mary?” Sherlock puts the slightest emphasis on the pronoun. She raises her eyebrows.  
  
“It’s irrational behaviour from someone in your position,” he continues. “You’re undermining your current advantage. I have a history of ruining John’s relationships. You should be afraid that he might forgive me, not encourage it. What if he comes back to live in Baker Street? What if he starts putting cases above your dates, just like he used to in the past?”  
  
Mary smiles a soft, pitying smile. “I know he used to be like that, yeah, I’ve been warned. But – you have to understand, Sherlock, that something has changed. Do you know what that is?”  
  
Sherlock straightens his back unconsciously. The bandage covering the gash which he refused to have stitched pulls at the fabric of his shirt. “I might have an idea, yes.”  
  
Mary sighs. “I don’t really think you do. You see, back then – he trusted you. Without question, from day one. A man with trust issues the size of Westminster Abbey and then you came along and said  _Run_  and he – just ran.”  
  
Mary keeps talking, her words sometimes punctuated by the tap of her forefinger on the top of the table, but Sherlock is not listening. He ponders this new information, this unexpected angle of insight into John’s character.  _Of course he doesn’t trust you now. He probably suspects you of suffering from post traumatic stress disorder. Who in their right mind would put their trust in a man whose reactions might get unpredictable, whose mental health is disrupted, whose very sanity can be questioned?_  
  
And yes, the irony of that is not lost on Sherlock, that  _he_  trusted  _John_  from day one. But Sherlock has made a habit out of risking his life to prove he’s clever. John... There’s nothing  _that_  wrong with John. John is  _good_.  
  
“...with not telling him. You broke it.” Mary is about to finish and Sherlock blinks back to awareness. She shrugs, something like apology in her tone. “And I think he’ll never get back to how he used to be with you. I don’t think you could steal him from me.”  
  
Not so selfless, then. Sherlock decides that it’s a point in Mary’s favour. John deserves someone normal.  
  
“Why change the status quo, then? I  _know_  I’m not the right person for John–”  _at all_  “–at the moment. He knows it too. I believe he would even say so if you asked him.”  
  
Mary shifts on the chair, takes in the kitchen in one long look around. “What John says is one thing. What he  _wants_  is sometimes a completely different thing.” She smirks a little. “And then there’s an even  _more_ different thing – what he really needs.”  
  
Sherlock cuts a thread of wool to the size of the slide and prepares a sample. “What about my needs? I, for instance,  _don’t_  need his pity.”  
  
Mary lets out a short laugh. “Oh, he doesn’t have any pity for you, trust me. Look – everything you’ve done so far. For him. Just one more thing, just once.”  
  
Sherlock closes his eyes against an image of dark green trees, a plain black gravestone, seagulls high in the sky. Suddenly he can smell mould and paraffin oil and dried blood and days old stains of piss on a concrete floor and the sensation is so sharp that he shudders involuntarily. Interconnected memories. He should see to the maintenance of his Mind Palace soon.  
  
“Give him a chance to say thank you for saving his life,” Mary pleads and Sherlock, against his better judgement, nods.  
  
“I’ll be there.” 

 

*

  
“Can’t believe you managed to get a table. I was on the list for two weeks!” John fiddles with his wine glass and takes a surreptitious look around. “Also, you’d think that they’d have banned us from here for good, after that... after last time.”  
  
Opposite him, Mary’s eyes are two large diamonds in the candlelight, shining with amusement. “I have my methods.”  
  
John has a brief hilarious thought of asking the waiter for a bottle of champagne and then he thinks better of it.  
  
“Well, what’s the occasion? If you want me to propose properly, since we got so... derailed last time, you should give me back the ring for a mo–”  
  
Words run dry in John’s throat as he spots Sherlock entering the Restaurant door.  
  
“What the  _hell_ , Mary–”  
  
She leans forward quickly, her voice quiet and pointed. The diamonds in her eyes could cut glass.  
  
“Listen, love. I set this up to give you – both of you – a chance to get it right. To behave like  _civilised_ men.”  
  
John fumes under his breath. “What? To  _play it out?_  To pretend that–”  
  
“Just try to imagine it, okay? Imagine that the man you’ve missed for two years is coming across the room,” Mary continues without mercy. “And he’s coming to you. Nobody else knows he’s alive. No press, no evening news, no Twitter, and he’s coming to see you, to give you what you’ve asked for. Would you rather find out from the telly?”  
  
John can hear his own frantic voice bouncing off a deaf gravestone,  _Just one more miracle, for me_. _Don’t... be... dead._  
  
“Did you think I hadn’t noticed? How miserable you’ve been?” Mary whispers softly.  
  
The whole idea is ridiculous. John shouldn’t be able to simply forget their first meeting, the week of shunning, the bonfire, their last fateful interaction. And yet... Maybe it’s the scenic setting, Mary’s choice of dress – the same – maybe it’s the look on Sherlock’s face as he approaches the table, something equal parts scared and hopeful – that John feels himself slipping into the role.  
  
There’s that river of blood red anger coursing its well-worn bed in him again but this time he reins himself in and closes the flood gates before it overtakes him. He holds that wave behind the dam of _civilised_ behaviour and suddenly he notices that there is another stream of emotion inside him, underneath the anger. It was drowned out the first time but now he can feel it at last. It’s joy, a trickle of mirth, a little streamlet of happiness, clear, uncorrupted and refreshing. John takes a breath and for the first time in nearly two years he feels alive again.  
  
A third chair materialises at their table seemingly out of nowhere – John is too blindsided watching Sherlock to notice the waiter who no doubt obeys Mary’s clever instructions. Sherlock slides onto it, folds his hands in his lap. Clears his throat. Says nothing. His eyes seem to plead with John for something, for a cue.  
  
John swallows. He’s not sure he can go along with this game, it feels too weird. “You haven’t actually deleted the first time, have you.”  
  
Sherlock frowns. “I never delete anything concer–” Something flicks in his eyes, like a shutter cutting off the light from the lens. “Of course not,” he says instead.   
  
“Good.” John breathes in. He shakes his head. “God, you’re–”  
  
“Not dead,” Sherlock finishes quickly. Opens his mouth, lips formed around the ‘o’ sound. John narrows his eyes:  _say ‘obviously’ and I’ll throw the table at you._ Sherlock closes his mouth like a fish, without a sound. He stares at John for some time, his small frown deepening. At last, he volunteers: “Are you okay?”  
  
John can’t help it, he laughs. “Of course. I’m  _overjoyed_.” He feels a sharp stab in his ankle: Mary has kicked him under the table. It sobers him a bit.  
  
“A bit – thrown off, I suppose,” he admits. “Can’t believe that–”  
  
“I assume I owe you a thousand apologies.” There’s something peculiar about the wording of that phrase that John finds – oh yes.  _In fact, I am not sorry_ , Sherlock’s biting words echo through his mind. In the present, Sherlock’s tone grows a scathing edge.  
  
“Perhaps we could subtract those that already transpired between us from the total amount.” He’s looking at Mary, something like defiance in that level gaze. “To speed up the reconciliation process?”  
  
“In that case, you can skip the explanation bit. It’s been all over the papers already.” Mary wears her  _professional nurse_  smile. Sherlock’s antics slide off it like water droplets from a teflon surface.  
  
“Right. The full version is classified anyway.”  
  
John knows where that stab was aimed. “Jesus. I’ve missed this. Feeling like punching you when you speak – and it’s not even subtext anymore.”  
  
The corner of Sherlock’s mouth twitches. “I believe you wouldn’t avoid my nose and teeth this time.”  
  
“Been there, done that.” John’s voice rasps on the too dry joke. The dim light in the Restaurant is just enough for him to make out the tiny scar on Sherlock’s bottom lip. It’s odd, a simple fat lip shouldn’t have scarred like that. This looks older, and like a mark of something that must have been a rough experience. Sherlock was never careful. Too many people have made him bleed, and John’s own name is on the list. He hates himself for it, for being the last one to do that. He crosses his forearms on the table and leans closer.  
  
“Bloody hell, Sherlock. Do you have any idea–?”  
  
“I haven’t, actually.” Sherlock shrugs. “I had no idea you’d be so affected.”  
  
John jerks his head back. “What?” He shares an incredulous look with Mary. “Really? My best friend commits suicide right in front of me and you expect me not to be affected?”  
  
It’s Sherlock’s turn to nearly fall off the chair. “Your  _what_?”  
  
This is so not the reaction John has been expecting that the low flames of growing anger in him are suddenly quelled by a cold douse of astonishment. Sherlock is looking at him as if John has grown another head overnight.  
  
“You were my best friend,” John repeats, emphasising each word with a slight nod.  
  
Sherlock grabs a glass of wine – Mary’s – and empties it in one gulp before Mary can put a word in protest. He doesn’t seem to notice that the table is set only for two. His hand shakes lightly when he puts the glass back.  
  
“I couldn’t have been.”  
  
“I think I’m the authority on who is and who isn’t my friend and, trust me, you were. It. My best friend.” John speaks very quietly but his voice still breaks a little on the last word. It hurts nearly as much as at the time in Ella’s office, with the rain beating on her large windows. It seems to John now that it always rained in London those days.  
  
Sherlock’s gaze turns inwards and he keeps flicking his eyes from left to right and back in tiny automatic movements. It looks as if he’s reading something, pressed for time. His voice is laden with distress. “I’ve often been rude to you. Dismissive. Arrogant. I drugged you, that time at Baskerville – fine,  _attempted to_. I experimented on you all the time. I was terrible to your girlfriends, on purpose. I was... you kept saying I was hell to put up with... how could I be your... there was no reason for it!”  
  
“Oh God,” Mary sighs quietly to herself. She rolls her eyes. “ _Logic._ ”  
  
John can already see the edge of his exasperation.  _Calm down_ , he reminds himself.  
  
 “Remember that birthday message you made for me? That ‘all my friends hate me’ one?” John laughs shortly. “Well, you didn’t. Hate me.” He rubs his shoulder, clenches his traitorous trembling hand. Grumpy, defeated words he once said to Mike –  _Who would want me for a flat-mate?_  – float to the forefront of his memory.  
  
“I’m not the easiest person to live with,” he continues. “I’ve got a bit of a temper–”  
  
“A bit?” Mary quips innocently. John chooses to ignore it, concentrating on Sherlock.  
  
“This ‘putting up with you’ business was mutual, in fact. And then...” he looks down at his hands. “Then you made me think I’d lost you.”  
  
Sherlock’s hands grow restless. He snatches a linen mat from the table and keeps folding and unfolding it in his lap.  
  
“I suppose... I assumed you’d be fine. People lose their dear ones all the time. Your father died shortly before your discharge and I never saw you grieve  _that_  much–”  
  
John’s fist lands on the table. Mary hisses. Several waiters give them suspicious looks. John’s voice is very quiet when he speaks.  
  
“I didn’t  _blame myself_  for my father’s death.”  
  
Sherlock blinks. John continues, deadly calm. “Would you have done it – would you have faked it – if you knew I’d be blaming myself for your death?”  
  
“Why? Why would you do that? Your attitude during the whole time was unflinchingly loyal. You had no share in destroying my reputation–”  
  
“The bloody reputation I helped to create!”  
  
John feels Mary’s hand on his.  _Voice down_ , oh yes. He needs this conversation, he needs to make Sherlock understand, and they can’t afford to get thrown out again.  
  
“I remember how you complained about the notoriety. You would avoid publicity, you would let the Yard’s detectives take all the credit, you hated being photographed...” John recalls all those forced smiles at press conferences, all those little moments when Sherlock needed to brace himself before they would open the door and face the storm of flashlights.  
  
John on the other hand – John used to enjoy it. He huffs a bitter laugh. “It was my blog that made you famous. Nobody was reading your website, remember? And there I was, preening like a bloody peacock every time someone mentioned that they liked ‘the one with the Aluminium Crutch’! If I’d known it was all a plan, if I’d known you were letting Moriarty destroy you, if you had bloody let me in – but you didn’t, and I thought you jumped because you couldn’t bear the loss of your Work, of your reputation. And I kept thinking that the bastard wouldn’t have had anything to destroy if I wasn’t there with my stupid blog in the first place... I felt like I put you on that roof myself.”  
  
John rubs at the dangerous hint of salt in the corners of his eyes and waits. Sherlock appears to be still processing. When he answers at last, it’s in a small, confused voice.  
  
“I never cared for the publicity. The Work was the only thing that mattered, John. You surely knew that.”  
  
John’s spirit drops.  _Of course the Work was the only thing that mattered. Not his colleague – not his friend..._  He turns to Mary. “There’s no point in this. Can we–”  
  
She gently squeezes his hand and levels a pointed gaze at Sherlock. “This is the part where you say you’re sorry,” she prompts.  
  
That soft, confused openness evaporates from Sherlock’s face in an instant. The expression left behind could well be chiseled out of marble. “I’m not.” He gestures to John. “He’s alive. Ignorant and hurt and alive is always better than knowing and content and  _dead_.”  
  
John feels a smile growing on his face, the one that pulls the corners of his mouth wide but not up. Young Harry used to run to her room when she saw him smile like that.  
  
“That’s rich. Good thing then that I  _haven’t_  done myself in like I wanted to when you were gone.”  
  
The crack of tearing fabric is the only sound in their little bubble of silence. Sherlock stares down at the two halves of the table mat in his clenched fists. Not a line in his face moves but he suddenly looks as if the only colour in his skin is the soft golden glow of the candles.  
  
“I... I didn’t know it would be...”  
  
Then he stops stammering. John can almost see something in his eyes turn around, like a cornered animal that has reached a dead end and, blinded with fear, turns around to scratch and bite and kick at a much larger opponent. Sherlock opens his mouth and the words start to flow, measured and sharp.  
  
“I can’t apologise for a mistake I made based on a lack of information – information that has been deliberately withheld from me.”  
  
His accusing tone doesn’t leave room for objections. “I was labouring under the impression that my death wouldn’t affect you too terribly. You knew you were my  _only_  friend but I never heard confirmation that even a fraction of that sentiment was mutual.”  
  
“Sherlock–” Mary says anxiously but Sherlock’s words only gain speed.  
  
“When I introduced you as a friend, you corrected it to a ‘colleague’–”  
  
“I hardly knew you at the time!” John manages but Sherlock is still speaking.  
  
“–the very last thing you said to my face, if I recall correctly, was–”  
  
“Don’t!” John shouts. Miraculously, Sherlock shuts up.  
  
John ignores the approaching waiter, ignores the looks of people from other tables. “So it was my fault. Why is everything –  _always –_  my fault?”  
  
Sherlock stands up and straightens his jacket. “I’m a high functioning sociopath, John. Surely you weren’t expecting me to pick up on whatever subtle signs of emotional dependency you deemed too impertinent to actually  _show_.”  
  
John stares as if slapped, unable to form words. Beside him, Mary buries her face in her hands. Sherlock shooes away the waiter and leaves, not looking back.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>   
>  "Why are _you_ doing this, Mary?"


	3. Lines and Labels

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A new case appears.

Marylebone Road is a blurred bundle of light trails, white and red lines of car lights passing by, lingering in Sherlock’s vision like on a time-lapse picture, splashed with red and green and orange fuzzy puddles of traffic lights and cabs. His eyes are burning by the time he rounds the corner to Baker Street and he realises he hasn’t blinked the entire way home. He doesn’t remember how many steps he took to get there; he might as well be floating. Mrs. Hudson is calling something after him but he doesn’t hear her. Everything is buzzing.  
  
Step in. Let gravity take care of the coat. Tumble onto the sofa. Enter the door. The knocker is still hanging to the side. How long is it going to stay that way? Down the spiralling flights of stairs.  
  
When he bursts through the door to the padded cell, the lights are already on. He’s been expected.  
  
“You... never did feel... did you? How did you.... never feel?” He’s still breathing too fast, even though just stepping over the threshold of the cell has calmed him. Outside the cell, the corridors are still quaking and crackling with the tension of staving off a panic attack. Outside the Palace, everything is still buzzing, lighting up,  _too much_.   
  
Jim Moriarty huffs the hair off his face and gives him a sly grin. “Don’t you remember? It sort of comes with this place.”  
  
Sherlock looks around. Yes, that’s why he chose this place for Moriarty, why he bound and chained him in here. This cell is an exact replica of the cell in that mental asylum near Warsaw. He let himself be locked away there for what should have been a few days while he investigated a local drug trafficking ring run by someone from the staff. He underestimated just how heavily they would sedate him. Some days he didn’t feel his own fingertips. Most of the time he didn’t feel a thing. One of Mycroft’s agents extricated him after two weeks, before they actually  _made_ a maniac out of him.   
  
“You can always join me,” Jim teases. “No-one ever bothers you here.”  
  
Sherlock’s very core hurts. The padded walls make it better, but only by postponing the pain.   
  
“How could I have missed it? He told me I was his best friend and I never noticed.”  
  
“Oh, dead easy,” drawls an amused voice behind him. The Woman enters the cell, sneaking behind his back and playfully twirling one of his curls with her fingers by way of a greeting. “Probably the same way he missed he was in love with you.”    
  
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Sherlock scoffs at her. She steps over the length of Jim’s chain, briefly pats his head like one might pat a watch dog, and leans against the stained wall. She’s in full Dominatrix attire, wearing a see-through black dress and impeccable make-up. Not a single hair comes loose from her coiffure when she nods.   
  
“Oh yes. Hopelessly. So deeply he didn’t even notice.”  
  
“Stick to the riding crop. You trade in physical sensations. What do you know about... that?”  
  
“About love?” She smiles wistfully. “Enough to envy it when I see it.”  
  
“But now he hates you,” Jim sing-songs gleefully. “I should send him a formal invitation to the club.”  
  
Sherlock pats his pockets. Something is prodding at him uncomfortably. When he finds it, it’s the scrunched up ball of a table mat torn in two. He stares at it for some time.   
  
“I could have lost him.”  
  
“You still don’t get it, Sherlock, do you? You already  _did_!” Jim howls. “Because guess what? I _won_.”  
  
“Yeah, you certainly look like a winner,” Irene rolls her eyes at him. “But he hates you now, that’s a fact,” she addresses Sherlock.   
“But... why?”  
  
“ _Everyone_  hates you, Sherlock.” Moriarty explains to him in a voice one might use to a five-year old. “Johnny boy simply fell out of love. Two years do that to a bloke.”  
  
“He will forgive you, eventually,” Irene remarks.   
  
“It doesn’t matter,” Sherlock replies mechanically.   
  
“So you don’t want to be his ‘ _best friend’_  any more?” Jim puts virtual air quotes around the words by waggling his eyebrows. “God, you’re so changeable. Even worse than me.”  
  
Sherlock feels the fabric on the walls with his palm. This is the only place not bearing any trace of John. Everything else, the very architecture of his Mind Palace, has by now been reconstructed and redecorated after the influence of his friend. The corridors now imitate those in the building where he saved Sherlock’s life. John is ingrained here.  
  
“No.” He shakes his head, surprised with this new discovery. “He’s everything to me. I want to be everything to him.”  
  
Irene clicks her tongue. “Darling, if you want to be hurt so badly, why don’t you let me do it? I’d take good care of you.”  
  
“Best friend would be more than you deserve,” Jim hisses from his spot on the floor.  
  
“Good luck with that, darling. Honestly.” Irene walks over to Sherlock, touches his cheek with her fingertip. “You’ll need everything under the sun to make John Watson update that label he’s got for you now.”  
  
“Best friend.” Those words feel hollow on Sherlock’s tongue.  
  
“Who he hates,” Jim adds promptly. “What a neat little box. He thinks like that, you know. An ordinary man with his ordinary boxes. Friends, best friends, girlfriends... fiancées... and of course, he’s not gay. Poor John Watson. So determined to colour inside the lines.”  
Sherlock looks at the Woman, for once a genuine question in his eyes. She smiles and leans up to whisper in his ear.  
  
“You have to give him new lines.”  
  


*

  
“That utter... cock, that – that – I can’t even–”  
  
 _“Yeah, it’s a cold day in Hell when my big brother can’t come up with an appropriate swearword, I get it. No need to shout.”_  
Harry’s tired voice comes more faintly through the speaker. She probably moved the phone a bit away from her head when John worked himself up all over again.  
  
“Sorry, but you’d be yelling too. He practically told me that it’s my fault he didn’t know I’d be grieving for him because I never bloody told him that he was important to me.”  
  
 _“Good point.”_  
  
“What?” John puts the phone in his other hand and turns in the opposite direction on his circling path through the living room. “Nope. Not a good point. He didn’t have a point.”  
  
 _"Oh I think he did. In a way. He’s Sherlock. Everything you told me about him–”_  
  
“Harry, you met him once and you hated him.”  
  
 _“Well, he’s an arsehole, right, but look, John, you aren’t the most... outwardly affectionate of men. I mean. That dinner last month, for me to meet Mary. I know you love her, you goddamn proposed to her, but neither I nor anyone else in that restaurant would guess so by just observing the pair of you. And I’m not talking about silly PDA’s_ , _God, no. Definitely not a Watson thing, that. You’d look wooden even if you were holding her hand on the street. It’s just how you are. Bottled up.”_  
  
“But he  _knew_  me! He used to read my bloody mind! Like my plans for the evening from observing which pair of shoes I picked up. All his little tricks.”  
  
 _“Reading your mind is not the same as reading your heart, is it?”_  
  
“For God’s sake, Harry, I didn’t – we weren’t–”  
  
 _“John, I think you’re grown up enough to know that you don’t need to want to shag someone to care about them. You lived with him; of course you cared about him.”_  
  
“Fine. That’s my point! How it is ‘of course I cared’ to you and ‘you never told me I meant anything to you’ to him?”  
  
 _“Are you asking me? Bloody talk to him!”_  
  
“Oh great.” John stares at the phone screen showing the length of the now ended call. “So much for family.”  
  
“I’m going to be your family,” Mary remarks, entering the living room with a stack of books in her arms. She looks expectantly at John where he stands still glowering at the phone, then she sighs and goes over to the bookcase, using her elbow to open the glass front.  
  
“You know what it means?” John says to the air as if he hasn’t even noticed that his audience has changed. “He thought I’d be fine. It was the Work that mattered, the Game, his best coup, outsmarting Moriarty, taking down his empire. He didn’t care for collateral damage. And I was just a tool.”  
  
He sits down heavily onto the sofa. “He gave each of us a role. Mycroft? The traitor. To think I yelled at him for giving Moriarty the information on Sherlock that was actually all made up! Me – guess what? The witness. I can just see the label he’s got for me in that bloody Palace of his. ‘Cares enough to grieve with credibility but his heart won’t be in it, no harm done.’ He used me. What kind of–”  _machine_  “– man uses his friend like that?”  
  
“He always used people around him, if your blog is anything to go by,” Mary replies. “Perhaps he didn’t see where the limits were.”  
  
John huffs. “Practically said I’m a heartless bastard because I didn’t cry my eyes out for my father. Where does he get off on judging people like that?”  
  
“Wrong baseline,” Mary mutters.   
  
“What?” John looks up. “Oh, d’you want help with that?”  
  
“It’s fine, thanks.” There’s a slight smirk in her voice. “I said, he’s got a terrible baseline for extrapolation. With Mycroft for a brother? And a landlady who’s giving him a special deal for helping to execute her husband? Plus, you told me you’ve met his parents. With them still alive, he probably doesn’t have a clue what it’s like to lose someone.”  
  
She sounds so cheerful when she says the last bit. It reminds John that Mary, though an orphan herself, never lets it dampen her mood. Probably cried out all her tears long ago. And yet she can relate to someone like Sherlock...  
  
“You’re too sweet, Mary. You can’t excuse everyone.”  
  
“I’m not excusing him.” She turns around and frowns. “He hurt you. I’m not excusing that.”  
  
“But do you think it’s my fault, too?”  
  
Mary sits down next to him and lays her head on his shoulder. “I think... that the one whose fault it is swallowed a bullet on that hospital roof. Moriarty – he was just a tad too clever for Sherlock, and  _he_  used you to make him jump, and now he’s dead and you can’t break  _his_ nose. That’s not fair, is it?”  
  
John closes his eyes. Is he really in fact mad at Moriarty and only taking it out on Sherlock? “That’s rubbish psychology, Mary.”  
  
“What are you gonna do when you stop being mad at Sherlock?” Mary asks quietly.  
  
“Huh. I don’t know.” John thinks he shouldn’t ever stop being mad. He lets out a sarcastic laugh. “Probably make him the best man at our wedding.”  
  
Mary leans away and looks at him, eyes wide with mock horror. “No. Absolutely not. I don’t know whose punishment would be worse.”  
  
John narrows his eyes as if he is seriously considering it. “Oh, he would be lovely. Imagine all the insults.”  
  
Mary laughs, the joke in her voice so light that it almost sounds like no joke at all. “Nope. No. John Watson, you’re not going to spoil my wedding day.”   
  


*

  
Sherlock lies on the sofa and his hands twitch. The lamp on the desk is on, chasing all sorts of minute shadows around the flat. There’s a smell of cold tea somewhere in the room. That’s strange: Mrs. Hudson wouldn’t bring him cold tea. When was it, the whiff of flour and a little sour hint of a spliff? – oh yes, more than half of a wing of maintenance ago.   
  
Sherlock has now almost finished the maintenance of the North and West wings of his Palace. The South wing seems to be in relative order and can go without his touch for another few weeks. The East wing he never enters.  
  
Last rooms of the West wing: events of the last couple of weeks. Haphazardly stacked facts, observations, experiences, realisations. Only so much his short-term memory can handle. The rooms smell of burning wood and singed leather. Note: buy a new pair of gloves.   
  
 _Amazing how fire exposes our priorities._  
  
It still bothers him that he doesn’t know who abducted John, put him in the middle of a bonfire, and then timed all those texts to Mary so they could save him. Would John have died if they hadn’t made it in time? What would be the  _point_?   
  
Flames. John’s dazed eyes. Sherlock shakes his head: wrong. Try again. Don’t let yourself be distracted. Someone had to be there, watching the bonfire. Listening to John’s muffled shouting. To that little girl screaming. Watching among the people standing there freezing their arses off and taking pictures of their children gawping at the bonfire...  
  
Sherlock’s eyes snap open.   
  
The scene of the bonfire rotates before his eyes like a still miniature of a landscape inside a snowglobe.  
  
 _There. Got you._  
  


*

  
“Hello, brother dear. How fast can you get me the CCTV footage from every camera in the vicinity of St James The Less church from the night of the fourth of November?”  
  
 _“Are you certain there would be anything of relevance?”_  
  
One of the few blessed things about Mycroft –in Sherlock’s opinion – is that he never asks for an explanation. It is also one of the most vexing traits about him but right now Sherlock is not complaining.   
  
“Quite certain. There was a woman at the bonfire taking footage of the whole incident.”  
  
 _“A lot of mothers take photographs of their children on such occasions.”_  
  
“I’ve spent two years avoiding security all around Europe, Mycroft. I can tell when there’s a camera pointed at me.”  
  
The whole scene keeps replaying at the back of Sherlock’s mind. He and Mary dropping the motorbike, rushing through the confused and horrified crowd. Yes, one or two people quick-witted enough to raise their phones when something interesting started to happen. But only one person, a tall woman bundled up in a large knitted scarf, standing quietly a short distance away from the chaos with a little camera in her hands. No child in front of her. She was already there when Sherlock rounded the motorbike into the park, and when he later looked up from John’s face to ask someone to call an ambulance, she wasn’t there any more.  
  


*

  
Sherlock’s excitement is somewhat dampened when Mycroft delivers the records in person.  
  
“Don’t fret, brother mine. I am entitled to be interested in a case where my own brother was targeted.”  
  
“John was targeted,” Sherlock mechanically corrects and scowls at his brother taking a seat in John’s chair. Damn, he should move it.  
    
Mycroft lifts one eyebrow. “You shouldn’t have spent the previous eighteen months of your cohabitation wandering around London practically joined at the hip if you didn’t want anyone to get ideas. If John was put into the fire, why does your coat smell of smoke?”  
  
Sherlock is saved from the answer by Mrs. Hudson entering the living room with a tea tray. And a plate of muffins. Chocolate muffins. If Sherlock had any doubts about the brilliance of his landlady, he doesn’t have them now. The slight wink she gives him as she leaves confirms that the extent of her own genius hasn’t escaped her. Sherlock puts the plate in a strategically chosen position between Mycroft and his laptop and retreats behind his desk to look over the footage. For the next couple of minutes, the room is filled only with the smouldering silence of self-restraint.   
  
“Here she is.” Sherlock turns the laptop around after a while, tilting the screen so that Mycroft can see. It shows a woman hailing a cab on a busy street near the park. She cuts a fine figure, tall on her high heeled shoes, and her face, framed with waves of dark hair, is pretty even in the poor resolution of the image.   
  
Half an hour – and a minute of Mycroft pretending not to notice Sherlock hacking into the register database – later, Sherlock announces:   
“Miss Janine Hawkins. Ring any bells?”  
  
“I’m afraid it does,” Mycroft replies gravely. “She works as a secretary for one Charles Augustus Magnussen.”  
  
Oh yes, Sherlock has come across that name in the past. More than once. His lips curl in disgust.   
  
“Why would he want to put John in danger? Why is he testing me? I doubt that my personal disregard for his methods, even though I’ve made it no secret, poses a serious problem for him. I’ve never had any reason to investigate him, so why would he have an interest in me?”  
  
“It’s his MO. The one you despise so eloquently. Finding people’s pressure points. You care about John? As long as he has means to harm John, he practically owns you.”  
  
Sherlock’s skin prickles at the implication. “But why me? Our paths have never crossed, and our circles do not overlap.”  
  
Mycroft clears his throat. Sherlock stares at him for some time, a little sick feeling of déjà vu growing in him.   
  
“Oh no. You? For me?  _That much?_ ”  
  
“To quote your surprisingly clever landlady,” Mycroft sighs as he eyes the untouched plate of muffins, “family is all we have in the end.”  
  
The silence stretches some more but this time, Sherlock feels it biting at  _his_  neck.   
  
“What are we going to do about him?” he asks at last.   
  
“The use of  _we_  noted and appreciated.” Mycroft taps his fingers on the armrest. “At the moment – nothing. He’s still useful to me.”  
  
Sherlock smirks. “Especially now that you are aware he’s planning to have a go at you?”  
  
“Exactly.”  
  
Sherlock rises and begins to pace the length of the room. “You have to keep John out of this. Don’t make him a pawn in your power plays.”  
  
“Far it be from me to play with your toys, Sherlock. You’re more than capable of breaking them yourself.”  
  
Sherlock stops abruptly in front of the mantelpiece and holds his brother’s gaze in the reflection of the mirror. “I mean it. He’s had enough of it.”  
  
“I see.”   
  
 _No, you don’t,_ thinks Sherlock.   
  
“I wonder, though.” Mycroft continues. “Kidnappings, hostages, bodily harm... those aren’t Magnussen’s usual methods. He prefers subtler ways. Blackmail. It’s important to find out what exactly he plans to use as leverage. Has John any dirty secrets...?”  
  
Sherlock ignores the amused drawl in the last words and counters with a question.  
  
“What if he’s not the last piece of the chain?”  
  
“Hm.” Mycroft cocks his head to the side, considering the possibility. “Someone for whom John Watson would do anything? Not many people in this world, I should think.”  
  
Sherlock closes his eyes against his own reflection. “And one less than you would think.”  
  
“Hm.” That contemplating sound again, designed to grate at Sherlock’s nerves. He knows that Mycroft doesn’t need to hum, his brain is capable of finding, exploring and cataloguing every angle to a given problem in under a second.   
  
“That leaves his sister, his soon-to-be wife, that nurse that allegedly saved his life – Bill Murray – and presumably his former commanding officer as well.”  
  
Sherlock does his best to keep the surprise from his tone. “He never mentioned his previous commander.”  
  
“I think you’ve already realised that John doesn’t mention many things.”  
  
Sherlock thinks that he would prefer Mycroft watching him getting beaten to a pulp again rather than this gentle, equally reproaching and pitying tone.   
  
“I suggest – in order to deny Magnussen the ammunition he wants – that you keep your distance from John, for the present at least.”  
  
Sherlock finds the amendment a tad excessive. As if John would let him close ever again.   
  
“That won’t be a problem.” It sounds more bitter than he intended.   
  
Mycroft gets up and comes to stand next to him. When he speaks again, it’s in a low voice, but no less pointed and resolute. “Where is it, Sherlock?”  
  
“What do you mean?” Sherlock asks even though he knows. Mycroft looks at him almost sadly.  
  
“You’re clearly not all right. Don’t make me search the flat.” It’s more a plea than a threat and that’s so disconcerting that Sherlock snipes out of sheer instinct.  
  
“What’s this? Brotherly concern? Finally found something you’re not excellent at?”  
  
Mycroft sighs again. “The repercussions were to be expected, brother.”  
  
Sherlock thinks about the recent nights at Baker Street, so quiet that he can almost hear the calling of his old days. He wonders if Mycroft can tell that Sherlock never turns off the lights at night. He probably can – Sherlock realises he forgot to wipe the dust from the lamp switch. He thinks about Moriarty, chained in the padded cell at the bottom of his Mind Palace, he thinks about giving him back his Westwood suit, slicking the unruly hair back off his forehead, thinks about  _freeing_ him, giving him a roof instead of a cell.   
  
 _You’re me_.   
  
The roof would be a complete circle, an endless length of an edge. Moriarty would be waiting.   
  
 _I told you how this ends. Off you pop._  
  
“I could use an assistant,” Sherlock blurts out. “A live-in one,” he adds a moment later.   
  
Mycroft’s eyebrows rise to unheard-of heights.  
  
 _Give him new lines_ , Sherlock hears the Woman’s voice in his head and he tumbles down the new path even though he has no idea where it will lead him.  
  
“My minder from that mission in Poland. He was marginally less obnoxious than the others. He’ll do.”  
  
Mycroft stares at him for some time. Then he nods.   
  
“Mr. Fairchild, of course. One of the rare kind who didn’t ask for a pay rise after working with you.He’ll be here in two days. Can you last that long?”  
  
“Yes.”   
  
It’s not a promise. Merely a statement. There is a case now. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "Where is it, Sherlock? Don't make me search the flat."


	4. Dancing on Tiptoes

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Observing each other from apart.

 

“Hey, love. Have some news – Harry won’t be able to make it for dinner.”

_“Oh. That’s bad. D’you think she’s–”_

“Oh no.” John puts the phone under his other ear and checks his watch. “She just called – an in-depth audit at work. Unannounced, to boot. She’s got to stay late and help with the accounting documents.”

_“Really? That’s weird. They had an audit just last month.”_

“Did they? How do you remember these things?”

Mary’s voice on the line curls around the words in such a way John can easily imagine her amused smirk as she says: _“Maybe because I actually listen to my future sister-in-law when she rambles on while you sit there and count the minutes ’til she leaves.”_

“Never gonna forget an anniversary, are you?” John laughs. “Anyway, I thought that I’d just stay here and catch up with the paperwork. With the dinner plans blown, you know.”

_“You think there’s some trouble at her job? Two audits in four weeks...”_

“It’s a big bookkeeping company. Someone feathering their own nest? I bet it’s nothing. Just sorry about dinner. Don’t wait up.”

_“I’ll leave you something small in the oven. Don’t fall asleep on the patient files!”_

John chuckles. “Love you too. Bye.”

 

*

 

Two weeks pass by in a quiet but carefully conducted investigation. Sherlock now knows everything there is to know about Harriet Watson’s affairs (boring) and Corporal William H. Murray’s past (marginally less boring but still nothing worthy of Magnussen’s attention). Subconsciously or by chance, he has left the two most important people on the list until last.

“Thank you for seeing me,Major.”

Sherlock looks around a light-filled study in a country house breathing with old-world charm, secluded from the outside by a high-security grade fence. The middle of nowhere, a quiet, reclusive spot like the calm eye in the centre of a hurricane of blame, hatred, and death threats. A man living here on his own, his only companions an ever changing number of half-anonymous faces of the household staff and his own reflection in the mirror.

A maid comes in, a woman in her late thirties with sharp eyes and an expressive mouth, carrying a tea tray.

“Thank you, Vicky.” Major Sholto pours out two cups, puts down the teapot and hands Sherlock his cup. His left hand stays folded in his lap. “Sugar? Milk?”

“Just milk, please.” The host carries through the ritual with the precision of guard-changing at Buckingham Palace.

“I understand you don’t agree to interviews very often.”

“Never.” Major Sholto doesn’t touch his own cup yet. There’s an edge of wariness in his light blue eyes. “I do make exceptions though... for old friends.” His face, where it’s not scarred, could well be made of wax: he doesn’t smile, the corners of his eyes don’t crinkle. “You said this was about John Watson.”

And yet, there, in the millisecond when the four letters of his friend’s first name left Sholto’s lips, Sherlock could swear he saw the smallest, the most fleeting of smiles. It grips at his throat, the sound of that name – _yes, definitely softer than his previous words –_ resonates with an odd heartbeat in his chest. Sharp eyes watch him, and Sherlock wonders if he’s being deduced.

“John has been attacked. I believe that someone wants to blackmail either him or people in his close circle.”

“I haven’t seen Watson since he was shipped out of Afghanistan.”

“But you matter to him.” _So much that he never mentioned you in front of me. Why not?_

“Mr. Holmes, was that actually a question?”

Sherlock blinks, caught. Was it? He meant to say it as a statement. ‘You matter to him.’ Even though his mind wanted to ask, _do you? How?_

Major Sholto briefly looks away. To Sherlock it’s too short a respite. He’s seated in a comfortable chair and yet he feels like he’s standing at attention, muscles aching with strain.

“But yes, I think I do.” Does he know how his every word shatters Sherlock’s self-control? Sherlock thinks he does. There’s still that edge in those eyes, a thin line between preventive hostility and... tentative acknowledgement of kinship.

 _This man is like me_ , Sherlock realises and knows that the semblance goes deep past the solitude of spirits, past the scars on their skin, both visible and hidden. Because suddenly Sherlock knows. This man has hurt John in the past – and though he’s been forgiven, he lives with the constant knowledge that the hurt might never be forgotten.

“I wasn’t sure.” Sherlock gives in to honesty. “I only knew John for eighteen months before I left for two years. I’m... hardly an expert on John Watson.”

“It isn’t easy,” Sholto remarks and again Sherlock wonders what was left unsaid. It isn’t easy to know John. Isn’t easy to care for him.

“But I do care for John,” Sherlock says. “Will you help me?”

Sholto must know what Sherlock’s really asking for. Not _will you help me with the case?_ But.

_Will you help me get to know John again? Will you help me get back to him again?_

Major James Sholto knows, and for the first time in their conversation he lets the shine of a smile wash over the good half of his face. He lifts his cup and takes a meditative sip.

“There was no incident during Watson’s active duty under my command that could be deemed questionable. Nothing that could serve as material for blackmail. My own career was spotless up until the battle when I lost my men, and that was after Watson had been sent home. I’m afraid I can’t help you with your investigation. But...”

Sherlock leans forward. The previous, he’d expected. What’s about to come is an extra.

“Do you know the story of how he got shot?”

 _Original circumstances of the injury were traumatic, wounded in action_. That’s all Sherlock was able to deduce about John the first day they met, and John never provided any details. Sherlock eventually came to the conclusion that John didn’t want to talk about it because he hated the scar, hated the reminder of being invalided, hated the bullet that took the battlefield from him, and hated the nerve damage in his arm that has made his surgical skills go to waste.

“We’d got a report from a village a bit farther into the mountains that some locals there were sheltering a group of Taliban soldiers. It was two days after a car bomb had gone off at the gate to the base camp, killing two patrols.”

Sholto pauses and Sherlock imagines the mood of the men of the task force. Seek and destroy. Revenge.

“So close to the hills, the winds are tricky. Too risky for an airborne strike. We drove up there and searched house to house.”

Adrenaline filling the air, singing in every nerve. Light fingers on the triggers. Men filing in and out of low doors, expecting attack behind every wall, every curtain. Villagers huddled together in the corners of their rooms. Did John enjoy it? Was he enjoying gambling with death?

“Then the search squad went into the village chief’s house, and suddenly there was an explosion from somewhere behind the building. There was a small courtyard and the enemy were taking that way to escape. I sent a couple of our snipers to take position on the roof and we went after them. The courtyard... it was a mess.

“Two dead soldiers among several bodies of civilians, killed by what was probably a grenade. Women, young lads. The enemy must have used them as human shields and then panicked and maybe something went off– it was a bloody great mess.

“There was a low wall around the yard and behind it a narrow field and then the hillside. Rocky, with something that looked like caves, lot of natural cover. I realised that they were going to gain the high ground, maybe support from the caves, and I ordered my men to retreat back to the house and regroup.

“The snipers on the roof and I and a couple of lads behind the wall were providing cover as the others ran back to the house. Then I heard shots fired directly behind me.”

Sholto takes another sip from his cup. The stillness of the hand in his lap contrasts with the minute tremor of his thighs. Tension, shock, relived even in the detached narrative.

“One of the dead soldiers wasn’t quite dead. He managed to grab a gun and fire a burst at my men as they crossed the courtyard, before the sniper got him. Because he was lying on the ground, he couldn’t aim too high. One of my men took a clear shot through his calf, another got a graze on his thigh. And John... when I turned around, John was lying there with a wound in his shoulder, in the process of bleeding to death.”

Sherlock wonders if Sholto has realised he’s stopped describing John by his surname.

“In the truck, he kept babbling about one of the women, that she wasn’t dead, that she had moved her hand...”

“He stopped and crouched over her to check,” Sherlock realises. “That’s why he was shot in the shoulder, while the others were injured in the legs.”

“He disobeyed my direct order,” Sholto says. “I told them to retreat, and he stopped on the way.” He smiles without mirth. “Always more a doctor than a soldier.”

“It wasn’t your fault,” Sherlock says after a long pause. He isn’t sure if that’s the right thing to say. Maybe Sholto isn’t the only one who needs to hear it.

“Everything that happens under my command is my fault,” Sholto says, squarely meeting his eyes. “Watson was a medic. He shouldn’t have been in the firing line.”

Sherlock knows they aren’t talking about the Afghanistan any more. He thinks he understands what Sholto is trying to say. Give John a battlefield and he’ll follow you to the ends of the Earth. But you shouldn’t forget that, though a soldier, John never stops caring.

 

*

 

Cold drizzle is soaking the collar of John’s jacket as he stands on the pavement, swaying a little and blinking at the flashing neon sign above his head.

“Guys, I don’t think I can handle another one.”

“Don’t be such a lightweight,” Pete jokes, dragging John and the others in probably by the force of gravity. “It would be a shame not to make it to closing time. It’s your last night as a free man!”

“Hardly,” John grumbles, trying not to stumble and looking for a place in some corner. “You guys know I’m not getting married ’til March.”

They’d wanted a summer wedding at first, but then about a week ago Mary turned around and began to plan the wedding as soon as possible. Given the emotional turmoil John had been through lately, he was actually glad of it. Settling down and building a safe, normal home looked like the best idea. They booked the first weekend in Chiswick – Mary’s birth place – that was available.

“Shame for Billy here, getting shipped out just after Christmas,” Matt slaps the man in question on the shoulder and Bill Murray shrugs.

“Still feeling bad that I won’t be there at your wedding, John.”

“Never mind, mate,” John grins. Then his eyes slip past Bill’s broad shoulders towards the crowd at the bar, and the grin fades from his face.

Among the people waiting for their orders, an unmistakable figure stands out like a sharp cut-out from a blurred background, sleek dark suit absorbing the changing blue, red and purple reflections like a black hole.

 _No fucking way_.

There’s no way John wants to run into Sherlock Holmes after two weeks of dead silence between them – and the whole mess before. John looks around for Pete and tries to signal to him to get the heck out ASAP when–

“Whoa, John, isn’t that that mad flat-mate of yours, over there?” Matt shouts over the music and damn John’s luck, Sherlock turns his head as if he is attuned to every conversation in the bar and his eyes immediately and unerringly find John, even in the midst of the crowd.

For a moment, everything else moves but Sherlock stands still. Or it is John’s head swimming with the shots? It must be the shots. Either the entire bar is moving into the background or Sherlock really is coming over to him. _Shit._ John can suddenly relate to every deer that has ever found itself in the headlights.

“Hello, John.”

“Hi. Uh...” John looks down at the tips of his shoes and then he realises he should be angry. Sodding stag do, bloody booze making his thought processes slurred and slippery. He snaps his head back and remembers his friends, standing around and clearly not having a bloody clue.

“Are you here for a case?” He’s rather proud of himself and his presence of mind to ask about that. He’s not a part of Sherlock’s detective work any more but it wouldn’t do to blow his cover. John’s not spiteful. He’s not.

“No, not at all.” Sherlock’s face is blank underneath the gleams of lights above the dance floor.

“Uh-huh.” John nods as if it makes perfect sense, which it doesn’t. Sherlock in a bar and not for a case? John is so out of his element that he notices the stranger’s hand coming to rest on Sherlock’s shoulder only after the stranger speaks up.

“Hey, Will, got bored waiting for me?”

John stares at the – _intruder –_ no, Sherlock’s friend, and hopes that the gaping he just did looked only like he was taking a really deep breath. The man appears to be slightly older than Sherlock but who can tell when he can look like a twelve year old when he needs to. He looks damn fit in his jeans and dark blue suit jacket and his blue eyes under a short blond haircut remind John of the latest James Bond, the one who looks more the part of a Russian spy instead of the good guy. And he just called Sherlock _Will_. Not for a case, my arse. John grins. His grin fades again when Sherlock doesn’t shrug the stranger’s hand off.

“John, this is Quentin. My... flat-mate.”

“And assistant. Quentin Fairchild.” Quentin smiles broadly and shakes John’s hand. “Though hardly a patch on your standards. I don’t blog.”

New assistant. New flat-mate. If John thought he was annoyed when Sherlock solved cases with Molly, this new guy screws the irritation up several notches.

“We met during my time... away. In Poland,” Sherlock adds and John realises that his silence is becoming awkward.

“Um... that’s good. Great.” John mentally kicks himself. _Get a grip, Watson. You sound like a jealous ex. You moved out of Baker Street more than a year ago, you’re getting married for fuck’s sake, did you really expect that Sherlock would be keeping your room free and, what, pining after you? He lived without you for two bloody years. Of course he moved on._

“Um. My friends–” John waves his hand around uncertainly. Pete is already deep in conversation with someone he happens to know and Matt seems to have sneaked out for a cigarette. Bill, dear old chap, waits patiently at John’s side like a loyal dog.

“It’s my stag do,” John finishes lamely. “A bit early, but Bill here–”

“Starts his next tour in Afghanistan just after Christmas, I know,” Sherlock interrupts him. Bastard, John will never know how he deduces these things. “In that case, let me buy you drinks. The tradition is a round of drinks, I believe?”

“You’re on, mate,” Bill Murray says quicker than John can scramble together a proper response from his confused brain. “Beer will do. The night’s still young.”

Sherlock strides to the bar to place his order. There’s quite a crowd and he has to wait. Bill disappears, probably to fetch Matt, and John is left standing next to Quentin, who is still smiling as if someone told him a hilarious joke. Bugger, John feels like _he’s_ the joke. Oh, there’s the anger he’s been missing, and this is not the place, not with the... whatever it is Quentin is.

“So, um, how do you like Baker Street?” John scratches his neck and cringes at himself. But still, he can’t help _but_ ask. “I should probably drop by one day and pick up those boxes I left at the bottom of the wardrobe... I hope they aren’t taking up too much space.”

The corners of Quentin’s eyes crinkle in amusement. “I wouldn’t know,” he drawls. “I sleep in the main bedroom.”

John feels a twinge somewhere in his stomach and decides that it’s anger. 

“So you worked with him on that ‘I had to do it all alone’ mission?” he fires off before he thinks twice of it.

Quentin doesn’t stop smiling, as if that mockingly polite expression is permanently tattooed on his broad face, but his eyes narrow and he gives John a quick once-over. When he speaks, it’s in a tone one might use to discuss last Sunday’s weather.

“John, can you shoot five people in under three seconds?”

“Whoa.” John huffs out an incredulous laugh. “That’s not a line you hear in a bar every day.”

“I’m serious, though.” Quentin’s face does two different things at once: friendly smile and cold evaluation. “I think you _could_. But you _wouldn’t_. You’ve got the skills, yes, but you’ve also got the qualms. Morals. You like Bond films, John, don’t you? You think that the proverbial licence to kill, that double-o status, it’s something you can get in Her Majesty’s Secret Service? You’re wrong.” Quentin taps his temple. “The licence to kill has to already be here.”

Quentin looks across the bar at Sherlock’s silhouette. “That’s why he had to go alone. He didn’t set out to _investigate_ Moriarty’s network. He set out to _eradicate_ it.”

John gapes, and this time he doesn’t care who might see. He let his bitterness lash out with that question, yes, but he didn’t expect to get punched in the gut with such blunt, point-blank truth for an answer.

He has killed people before. Enemy soldiers. Soldiers like he was, men who went to war, aware that they might not return alive and whole. He killed terrorists, a worse kind of enemy, people who didn’t care if they got back home. Even that cabbie was an enemy, a bad man about to do a bad thing. But would he be able to kill just – a civilian? A criminal, yes, but someone who wasn’t currently holding a knife to anyone’s throat?

“Did he–”

“Will had us for most of the dirty work.”

John exhales, fighting back the nausea rising from his stomach. Maybe he’s had one too many already, but damn, he could do with a drink right now. He wonders what _us_ means. MI6? Probably. Jesus Christ.

“And I wasn’t with him nearly as much as he needed,” Quentin adds in a softer voice, smiling again. The steel blade edge from his face is gone, it’s all warmth now. Sherlock is coming back, two bottles of beer in each hand. Pete, Bill and Matt materialise out of the crowd as if on cue, led by the unerring instinct of a pub crawler sniffing out free drink.

“Sorry.” Sherlock turns to his new flat-mate. “They don’t have your favourite.”

“’No problem. I’ve got to see a man about a dog anyway.” Quentin pats his arm and gives John a wave. “Nice to meet you, John.”

“To John,” Matt cheers and takes a swig. “Thanks, mate. And here I thought John always said you were a hundred percent antisocial.”

Sherlock shrugs noncommittally. John can’t tell if it’s an act or if he really should feel bad for this, for not asking Sherlock to go on the stag night with them. It’s true they aren’t exactly on speaking terms, but hell, they were once pretty close, weren’t they?

“Sorry,” he mutters. “Just thought you’d hate it. _People_ , y’know...”

Sherlock’s lip twitches. “That was rather thoughtful, John.” John nods several times, looks around at the bar _full of people_ , and feels like an idiot.

And just like that, he’s had enough.

“Just a sec, lads,” he tosses over his shoulder as he grabs Sherlock by the arm and drags him into a quieter corner. Finally eye to eye, with the closest approximation of privacy possible in such a place, he hisses up to Sherlock’s face. “What’s going on? What are you doing here?”

Sherlock raises his eyebrows. “I’m with a man, in a bar. Isn’t it obvious?”

“A bloody date?” John laughs disbelievingly. “No, it isn’t. You know what kind of beer he likes and he calls you _Will_? What’s that, a code name? Are you on a mission again?”

Sherlock looks at him down his nose. “You of all people should be aware that people do have middle names. Some people prefer to use them instead of the first ones.”

 _Sherlock William Holmes_? John rolls it around his brain. He backs off a little. “Ummm... I guess I thought you didn’t even have a middle name.”

“Certainly you never bothered to find out, for some reason.”

John recalls the weeks of prying which Sherlock invested into figuring out John’s middle name, and how he strangely felt almost flattered that such a trivial detail about him kept Sherlock’s interest for so long.

“That reason’s called respect for privacy,” he corrects automatically. Sherlock scoffs.

“That’s a concept I tend to overlook when it stands between me and the object of my interest.”

John blinks. Either that was a double entendre or he has definitely had too much to drink. Sherlock is looking at him as if John is an odd result in a line of experiments, something mildly interesting but on the whole not worthy of further effort.

“Right.” John clears his throat. “Thanks for the beer. Enjoy your... date.”

 _Sherlock as a sexual being. Jesus wept._ John still can’t wrap his head around it.

“Enjoy your stag night, John.”

 

*

 

The cab ride back to 221B is smooth and quiet. Sherlock feels the alcohol in his system like a soft background hum, making the world lag behind a bit when he turns his head too sharply. It’s unfair, he thinks, Quentin had nearly twice as much as him and he’s not showing the slightest sign of inebriation. But since it was Quentin who suggested an evening off to clear their heads from the investigation, Sherlock supposes that it’s right that he would be the one carrying the combined burden of getting them both home. Especially when Sherlock simply can’t figure out how drinking is supposed to clear anyone’s head of anything. His own head feels like a pond full of muddy water. The usually sharply defined circuits of his brain, where observations spark and deductions fly at light speed, are squashed into meandering streams filled with syrupy liquid.

He wasn’t planning on meeting John. The reasonable course of action would have been to ignore him, pretending he didn’t notice him and his group of friends as soon as they stepped into the bar, letting him beat a hasty retreat as John obviously wanted to and letting him get away with it. But then... Sherlock absently wonders if this is what an electron trapped in a magnetic field feels, following the inevitable path dictated by laws of nature.

Or a moon orbiting a planet. John would like that. He was always keen on the solar system.

Even though unexpected, it was an opportunity and Sherlock seized it and squeezed out of it everything he could.

Right now he feels a bit wrung out himself, leaning against the banisters in the hallway and weighing the prospect of sore ribs from sleeping on the stairs against the trouble to get up into the flat.

“Boys?”

Mrs. Hudson peeks through the door of 221A, frowning slightly as always when she spots Quentin. It’s not that she doesn’t like him, muses Sherlock, he’s effortlessly likeable and generally as good a tenant as they get, but she’s still rather reserved towards him. It puzzles Sherlock, and for some indescribable reason it also pleases him.

“You’ve missed a client. Such a nice young woman, a nurse I think. Her case was most extraordinary – she believed she had dinner with a ghost!”

“Thanks, Hudders.” Sherlock grins as she tuts disapprovingly, shakes her head at him and retreats back into her flat. Quentin stands there, looking as if he is biting his own cheek.

“She had a date with a ghost,” he repeats, still remarkably composed. Sherlock shrugs, the exaggerated movement nearly tipping him off the stairs.

“Seriously, are all of your private cases like that?” With that, Quentin loses it and collapses against the wall in a fit of laughter.

Sherlock can’t help but join in, laughing ’til his ribs strain for breath and his eyes sting. The joke isn’t particularly funny but the alcohol level in his blood makes up for it – he hasn’t laughed like that in two years and for now it almost doesn’t matter that something is wrong about it, that something feels out of place and Sherlock doesn’t want to think about what it is. He wants to forget, even if only for one night. He extends his hand.

“Come on. I’ve got a bottle of excellent whiskey upstairs.”

In the flat, Sherlock digs around the kitchen until he finds two glasses which have never contained anything corrosive and when he returns to the living room, he finds Quentin already comfortable in the armchair opposite Sherlock’s own. He doesn’t usually take that place, having probably picked up on some clue Sherlock was too tired to hide and respecting the unspoken rule that Sherlock himself unconsciously followed. But not tonight. Tonight is for forgetting, even just for a while.  

Quentin clinks his glass against Sherlock’s, leans back and chuckles to himself.

“What’s so funny?”

Quentin grins as if particularly pleased with himself. “Just that I might have messed with John’s head a bit. Earlier at the bar.” He takes a sip from his glass and winks. “Might have given the impression that we’re sleeping together. By the way, your back must be in a real state after a fortnight on that sofa. Sure you don’t want your bedroom back?”

Sherlock shifts his eyes guiltily away before he remembers he shouldn’t. He should stare Quentin down and deny everything, but the truth is he _did_ leave him alone with John in the hope that something like that would happen.

Quentin laughs. “Oh, Will, do you think I don’t know that one of the few benefits of my truly insufferable but sadly unavoidable presence here is making dear old John jealous?”

Sherlock looks into his glass for a while. Observes the way the liquid sloshes around, clinging to the glass, flowing down slower than water would. Adhesion versus cohesion, attachment versus isolation, reaching out versus keeping everything in.

“I do appreciate your presence here,” he says softly. It’s true. Quentin is a good companion, an efficient and expert investigator, his presence is unobtrusive and calming. He’s like another light source in the room besides the lamp that Sherlock never switches off. The shadows don’t dare come closer when he’s around.

“Same for me,” Quentin replies lightly. “Do you know why I agreed when Mr. Holmes asked me – and mind you, he asked, not ordered – to keep an eye on his little brother?”

Sherlock pulls his bored-by-this-easy-deduction face. “You find me physically attractive.”

“Same for _you_ ,” Quentin smirks, amused by the unguarded look of embarrassment on Sherlock’s face. “I think it’s my type that does it for you. Blue eyes, short blond hair...”

Sherlock attempts to rise from his chair and Quentin lifts his hand in a placating gesture.

“Hey, it’s all right. I know my place. But – just for the record – I wouldn’t mind.” He doesn’t articulate what exactly he wouldn’t mind but even through the haze of drink, Sherlock has a clear idea of where things are going.

“I don’t want to use you... like this.” Sherlock swallows with difficulty. “It’s not... not good.”

“Hey, hey,” Quentin repeats as if he is calming a frightened horse. “I know I’m not the one you want. Eyes open, hm? But I’m telling you, I wouldn’t mind. Have you any idea just how gorgeous you are?”

Sherlock snorts. “A general idea, yes.” He puts down his glass. “Aren’t you drunk? I am.”

But Quentin is not one to let go of the conversation topic so easily. “You’re a thing of beauty, Will. I think I wanted you from the moment I found you in that creepy asylum, underfed and doped silly and reeking of your own piss.”

Sherlock rolls his eyes. “I sincerely hope that the exact moment you started to fancy me came _after_ you got me sober and clean again.”

“And you know me, Will,” Quentin continues. “I never had a honourable bone in my body. I take what I can get. We both know that I’ll be boarding the plane back to Poland the moment this is over. Why don’t we enjoy the time in-between?”

Quentin’s empty glass joins Sherlock’s half-full one on the carpet and he leans forward, fingers coming to rest lightly on Sherlock’s knee.

“I don’t mind,” he repeats, an open challenge in his eyes, and his fingers slowly slide higher. Sherlock observes their progress, fascinated by the language of the body, a conversation that can be held with fingertips and lips instead of useless _words_ that have failed him so miserably with John. Would his reality be different now if he had tried to kiss the _I saved your life_ directly into John’s mouth on that morning after the bonfire, instead of trying to get it past his stubborn ears in the form of a misunderstood explanation?

Quentin’s fingers are asking, and Sherlock lets his legs fall open in an answer. When he rests his head against the armchair, he can imagine that it’s another man in the chair opposite him, grinning boldly and wickedly from between his knees, that it’s another man’s hand slipping through the fly of his trousers, that it’s another man’s breath on his skin that aches for touch. He can see it behind his closed eyes, swallowing another man’s name back from his lips, and Quentin doesn’t mind.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "I wouldn't know. I sleep in the main bedroom."


	5. White Rook

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Calm before the storm.

John thought the first Christmas after Sherlock’s death was wretched. He spent it alone, not picking up his phone, putting off the obligatory visit to Harry’s until the very last day and even then cutting it as short as possible. There was a hollow inside him, like a hole ripped through his core, and he didn’t dare to mend or fill it because first he would have had to see how big it actually was, and that wasn’t something he’d been ready to face.

Now he thinks that those empty days were almost a trifle compared to this year’s Christmas, spent with his and Mary’s friends and the cheerful prospects of their future life together. It’s the realisation that the hole is still there, unhealed and gaping as ever. He believed that his new life had filled it but in reality he has let the happiness and contentment grow around it, not in it – like bushes growing around a pitfall in the woods, eventually hiding it from plain sight but making it all the more dangerous. He still carries the wound, even though its shape has changed.

It’s worse now, actually, because Sherlock is not dead, he’s alive and whole and apparently happy in their – _no_ , _just his now_ – old flat some thirty minutes away from John’s and simultaneously so far away that he might as well be six feet under. It’s worse now because back then, John could have mourned him, it was unexceptional and sensible and acceptable to mourn the loss of a dear friend. Now, though...

That’s why he finds himself, two weeks after Christmas, on the pavement outside 221B Baker Street, pacing back and forth and trying to come up with a reasonable excuse in case Sherlock isn’t at home. Or, worse, if it’s that new chap who answers the door.

He’s abruptly saved from the trouble of decision when the door opens and Sherlock stops dead on the doorstep, one hand half in a glove and his collar still open. His eyes widen for a second and John can almost feel the gaze that sweeps over him, down and back up in one swift movement.

“Um. Hello.” John shifts on his feet. “I should have texted first, I know, but...” God, this is incredibly awkward.

“Yes, John?”

 _Go ahead, Sherlock_ , John pleads in his mind. _Just deduce that I’m bored out of my skull and that ever since I met you at that damned bar I haven’t been able to stop thinking about how we used to be. Deduce that I want to experience the thrill again, even if it’s for the last time, give me a real stag night instead of that mindless drinking, one more taste of the battlefield before I settle for the domesticity. Please, deduce it and spare me saying it aloud._

But Sherlock won’t meet him halfway, it seems. He finishes pulling on his glove and waits.

“I just...” John takes a deep breath and gestures in the general direction of the street. “Are you going out on a case?”

Sherlock is still standing in the doorway, studying John with a strangely detached expression. “Yes, in fact.”

John peers into the hallway and thinks of biting off his tongue. “Quentin not coming?”

“Not this time, no.”

“Mind if I join you?” It’s out quicker than John intended and the words seem to hang in the air between them like a balloon full of blown-up insecurity and the rubber of hope stretched too thin, just about to burst under the first pinprick-sharp word of rebuttal.

“Just like the old days,” John adds, aiming for a joke and missing it by a mile. He knows it was the wrong thing to say as soon as the words leave his mouth, too close to the _Just the two of us against the rest of the world_. Jesus, Sherlock would be justified in punching him right then and there.

Sherlock’s eyes narrow. “You’re asking me to... run you.” There’s the faintest of smiles playing around his lips. John exhales, the air too hot in his lungs. Good. No punching, then.

He laughs, catching and holding onto the tentative armistice offered through the joke. “Yeah, rub it in, why don’t you?”  He looks down the street, then turns his head back, a crooked smile that feels almost foreign on his face. “It’s just Mary and her friends planning the hell out of the wedding in our living room and I don’t even understand the decisions they want me to make. I mean, one slice of cake tastes pretty much identical to the other, especially after the eighth try...” John bites his lip to stop the babbling and squares his shoulders.

Sherlock regards him silently for a moment and then fishes out his phone, presumably to fire off a quick text to Lestrade or whoever is working with him on this case, sparing a half-interested glance at the screen and dropping it back into his pocket just as the soft _ping_ confirms the message sent.

“You’re going to like this one,” he remarks. “I’m heading for Wellington Barracks.”

“Expecting me to pull rank again?” John smirks.

“Only if you enjoy it.” Sherlock’s voice comes out as an amused rumble, deeper than usual, and again John wonders if there really is another meaning to that sentence, one that, uttered in anyone else’s company would make him snigger and jab his elbow into his mate’s side – only Sherlock isn’t the type who enjoys innuendos and the very thought of addressing him as ‘mate’ confuses the hell out of John.

*

 

At the entrance to the barracks Sherlock lets John take the initiative. But even the military credentials aren’t enough to buy them access into the barracks of Her Majesty Household’s Guards and they are told to wait. The park bench is hard and cold in the crisp January air and it seems that this might be one of the longest hours in John’s life.

“So...” he clears his throat. “How are things going?”

Sherlock shrugs, staring ahead of himself. “They’re going.”

John bites his lip before he remembers that Sherlock probably isn’t being evasive – just literal. He always complained about times of stagnation, a lack of cases used to send him crawling up the walls. ‘Things going’ mean that he’s occupied, and that’s well.

“That’s good.” Pause. _Do not ask_. John asks. “And what about your new relationship?”

Sherlock looks at him out of the corner of his eye, barely moving his head. “My _new_ relationship?”

John cringes. “Your _current_ relationship.”

Sherlock lifts his chin contemplatively. “Because ‘new’ would imply I previously _was_ in a relationship...”

“Which you weren’t?” John wants to sound incredulous but it only confirms the suspicions he always had.

Sherlock looks at him again, eyes like the tinted windows of a car. John can try and peer inside all he likes but he can’t see a thing. “Which I wasn’t, apparently.”

John shakes his head. Something about that sentence stirs him in a wrong way. He quickly scrambles for a diversion.

“I mean, if it works for you, it’s great. It’s good to... open up. Let someone in.” John fishes for the right words. “It can change... your entire life... for the better.”

“I know,” Sherlock agrees simply and to John’s disappointment he doesn’t elaborate any further. “Is it like this with you and Mary?” he asks instead.

John leans forward, rubbing his hands to warm them. He smiles to himself. “Oh yes. She has completely turned my life around. Changed everything. I hope Quentin is doing the same for you. It’s good to meet someone like that, isn’t it?”

“I am in charge of my own life, John,” Sherlock returns coldly. “I don’t require anyone to turn it around for me.”

The bit of warmth he felt dissipates not only from John’s hands but from his chest as well, leaving behind the cold pang of disappointment.

“Yeah, you invented your own job. I get it,” he laughs and it sounds lame even to his own ears. But really, what did he expect? Sherlock, ready to commit? Willing to let someone in? No way. The world has run out of miracles already. 

 

*

 

“Major, please.” John draws a deep breath. “I’m John Watson, Fifth Northumberland Fusiliers. Three years in Afghanistan, a veteran of Kandahar, Helmand, and Bart’s bloody hospital. Let me examine this body!”

Sherlock stands in the middle of that perfectly impossible crime scene – _no weapon, victim alone in a cubicle locked from inside, no time frame in which the murder could have happened –_ the blood of Private Bainbridge spilling all over the floor and mixing with water and soap and shards of broken glass, and even though the sergeant has at last released him to do his work, even though he’s finally free to look and touch and examine to his heart’s content, he goes on about the routine on semi-automatic. John’s insistent words keep ringing in his ears, bringing up Major Sholto’s story and illuminating it from a new angle.

John will always stop to check, he’ll always demand permission to examine, to perform what he sees as his duty. To Sherlock, dead bodies are on the same level as shoeprints, scratches on the furniture or perfumes lingering in the air. There’s nothing he could find out about a dead body here that he wouldn’t be able to learn from a detailed autopsy report later. But for John, the bodies are still people, not clues. It reminds Sherlock of that day when John berated him for not caring about those twelve people who died in the explosion during his Game with Moriarty. They were absolutely unimportant, below the resolution capacity of both James Moriarty and Sherlock Holmes, but there was still John to advocate their case, not letting it rest.

Sherlock wonders whether John was always like that, never missing the opportunity to make sure with his own hands, or if it’s a lesson learned through the bullet that sent him home from Afghanistan.

Then John’s voice calls him out from the anterooms of his Mind Palace, dragging him to the surface of present time: “Sherlock.”

“Hmmm?”

“He’s still breathing.” 

The murder scene collapses in Sherlock’s mind like a house of cards, folding on itself and rearranging into a new shape. Around him, people are panicking, calling for an ambulance, and Sherlock finds himself with his hand being pressed on his scarf slowly seeping in blood.

“Nurse, press here, hard,” John barks out an order and _this is what I must look like from the outside when I’m in the midst of deduction_ , Sherlock thinks, _above all those unimportant details like who is actually in the room._

“Nurse?”

“Yeah, I’m making do,” John growls. Sherlock lowers his eyes and presses hard on the wound. He thinks of Quentin in 221B and replies silently in his mind: _So am I._

 

*

Sherlock closes the door behind him and hangs his coat onto the hook. The scarf is beyond redemption but it doesn’t matter. He has lots of scarves.

He’s tired. He wasn’t able to solve the case. The attempted murder of Private Stephen Bainbridge blocks his thoughts like a boulder on a crossroads, obstructing the passage from every direction.

Quentin closes his book and gets up from where he was lying on the sofa, stretching his back. “Now I’m getting why there are so many complaints about milk on John’s blog. You really are incapable of fetching it.”

“I got distracted.” Sherlock walks into the kitchen and fills the kettle. The fine blade that caused the mysterious wound in Bainbridge’s back could well be wedged into his mind now. He’s torn between distractions, one layered upon another like multiple reflections inside a kaleidoscope. The foremost one is the one he gave to John today, a momentary alleviation of the life John is building so carefully for himself, a reality as frail as glass spun of lies – no. Thankfully, the kettle boils.

“You’ve been very distracted lately,” Quentin says softly, coming up to him and leaning against the kitchen table. “The investigation is complete, Will. You can’t evade it forever.”

Oh, and doesn’t Sherlock know it? It was the weight of this knowledge that chased him out of the flat today, to get milk, to do anything that could serve as a diversion. But then John stood there, looking so – so _real_ – and Sherlock checked his inbox while pretending to send a text and picked up the first case that caught his attention. And then – then he wasn’t able to solve the case, and John said ‘Thanks, Sherlock’ outside the police station once they finished giving statements and then he turned on his heel and walked away to the nearest Tube station, heading home. John back in his chair in 221B, drinking tea and talking about the case, that’s not real. It’s a dream and Sherlock knows better than to daydream.

He needs something to stop the itch under his skin; his entire being craves something he cannot name because it’s so much bigger than him, in the same way that a mole doesn’t have a word for darkness because his eyes have become atrophied. He turns around, nearly blind with the white noise in his head, and reaches for Quentin, fingers wrapping around a solid shoulder. Quentin is here. Quentin is _real_.

“Distract me,” he commands, voice low and rough with desperation. Quentin takes the hand off his shoulder, kisses one knuckle after another. Then he turns and heads to the bedroom, stopping on the threshold, head tilted to one side, not asking. Just waiting.

Sherlock hesitates only a moment. Then he swiftly crosses the living room, switches off the lamp, wiping the smudge of dust from the pad of his finger, and walks into the bedroom.

 

*

 

Sherlock sits cross-legged in his chair, knees tucked into the armrests, the tingling in his feet having stopped since the blood circulation in his lower limbs gave up on the task hours ago. Outside, it’s mid-morning, reluctant winter daylight fighting a losing battle with the drawn curtains. The cup of tea at his side has gone cold. He turns another page of his old copy of _Illiad_ and forces his eyes to focus on the words.

Does John know the legend surrounding the birth of Asclepius, the ancient god of healing? He might. The original Hippocratic Oath called Asclepius as a witness. _I swear by Apollo, the healer, and Asclepius, and Hygieia, and Panacea_ _, and I take to witness all the gods..._ From Sherlock’s point of view, distorted by years of observing the worst of human nature, it’s an old-fashioned crime-of-passion story, down to the last mundane detail. A woman renowned for her beauty, a secret lover of the god Apollo, carries the fruit of their love. But then her father steps in: she’s told to marry her cousin. The docile daughter, obedient to her father, consents to the marriage. Apollo, furious with her betrayal, kills her but saves the unborn child. Adultery, jealousy, anger – the oldest motivators for murder in the history of mankind and, apparently, of the divine pantheon as well.

 

Save for one detail that seems to bear more significance the more the days go by and is the reason why Sherlock hesitates to take the last step in his case. The news of his lover having been wed to another man was brought to Apollo by his herald bird, a white rook. And the first thing Apollo did, before he went and struck his lover with his divine punishment, was to curse the rook for eternity and turn its feathers black.

It’s dangerous to be the bearer of bad news. 

Mycroft, for once, is not pressing him. He likes to play chess with the pawns blindfolded, unaware of their real value and position on the chessboard. He would actually prefer it if Sherlock remained silent.

But Sherlock has remained silent once already, leaving John out of the picture. And look where that took him.

John is bound to find out sooner or later. The bonfire attack has signalled that Magnussen is planning on using his leverage at some point in the future. The truth will be unearthed and brought to light. Would John then be angry with Sherlock for not telling him sooner? For not telling him at all? For trying to _spare him_ again?

But having to look into those anguished eyes as they fill with hurt, betrayal and anger, and feeling his own metaphorical white wings burning to a crisp, leaving behind only charred and broken skin...

And yet, there’s this treacherous hope, like the last white feather fluttering in the wind as it falls to the ground. Hope that John will at last see the true meaning of Sherlock’s actions. That he won’t let himself be blinded by the easy conclusion that Sherlock is stealing his new life, destroying his happiness. Hope that John, in the end, won’t hate him.

Sherlock turns one more page even though he knows that he has already made the decision. He woke up with it this morning, opening his eyes to stare at his bedside table for the first time in more than a month. The decision took root in him several hours earlier, with the feel of the weight of Quentin’s body on his back reassuring and grounding him. It grew with Quentin’s lips at once methodical and covetous on his nape and shoulders; it was sealed with the gasp Sherlock muffled with the pillow under his face as he came. When he asked Quentin to distract him that evening, he was craving the pain that was bound to be there after the years since he had last wanted this. He wanted it to be quick, unsatisfying, more a relief than a pleasure, over too soon to really mean anything. But Quentin must have guessed it, and instead of what Sherlock wanted, he gave him what he needed: Reverence. Slowness. Every movement drawn-out, impossible to dismiss, building up the sensations until Sherlock’s mind gave in under the pressure and he truly lost the awareness about everything save his own body.

When Sherlock came back to himself later, he knew two things: in another life, in a world where he never met John Watson, he could have fallen in love with the man in his bed. And, just as in this life, even that other Quentin wouldn’t love him back.

Sherlock closes the book and picks up his phone. He dials a number and lets it ring. It rings once, twice, several times more without answering. Sherlock dials again and waits. He can be patient.

 

*

 

Mary closes the door of the bookstore, scrunching her nose against the piercing sunshine of a rare clear winter’s day, the tinkle of the bell above her head so loud that she almost misses the text alert on her phone. She stops in the middle of the pavement, balances the heavy package on her hip and fumbles around her bag for her phone. When she finally manages to open up the touchscreen one-handed and with fingertips freezing off, she frowns at the message.

_–Get in the car, please._

 She looks around, the puzzlement clear on her face. There’s a black limousine waiting at the kerb a few yards down the street, engine idling. She walks up to it, slowing down as she gets nearer, but the car windows are tinted and she can’t get a look inside.

Shrugging to herself, she opens the rear door and gets in, settling the pack of books atop her handbag on her lap. The seat opposite her is occupied by a man, a tall posh one judging from the length of his trouser legs and the quality of his shoes. The rest of him is currently obscured by the widespread pages of Daily Telegraph.

The car doesn’t pull away from the kerb but remains stationary, the engine running to keep it warm. Behind a partition of frosted glass sits the silent figure of a driver wearing dark shades against the bright sun, unmoving and unresponsive, the type that doesn’t watch or listen unless told to, practically an extension of the car’s standard equipment.

“Um. Hello. I’ve read about this on John’s blog – this kidnapping off the streets and being vetted for the privilege of dealing with Sherlock Holmes. Just didn’t expect it could happen to me. I mean, John is not going on cases with Sherlock these days–”

“Hello, Mary.” Sherlock grins at her, folding his newspaper and setting it aside. Her eyes widen only a little, her face already cracking in a pleased smile.

“Sherlock! You startled me for a moment there.” She gestures around her. “What’s this about? Is something the matter with John? I tried to make him talk to you, you know I did, but–”

Sherlock lifts his hand to stop her, one finger pointed upwards. “Just one question – for starters.” He pauses, watching her lean against the seat, folding her arms, her eyebrows raised expectantly.

“Do you like codes, Mary?”

The heating goes on pumping warm air into the car but the temperature inside seems to drop below zero in the span of one second. In one swift, fluid movement, Mary lifts her hand from the bag hidden behind the large package, revealing a gun. It’s a Walther PPK, not a large or heavy handgun, and her grip on it is absolutely steady as she points it at Sherlock’s heart.

“Or whatever your name is,” Sherlock says, a satisfied grin slowly spreading on his face.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "Distract me," he commands, voice low and rough with desperation.


	6. Fracture

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Breaking point.

**_Save_ ** _souls now! **John** or James **Watson**?_

“That skip code,” Mary scowls as she recalls the coded message that alerted her to John’s kidnapping on the evening of the bonfire.

“Instantly recognised as a code.” Sherlock nods. “Moreover, you used the term ‘skip code’ when a common receptionist nurse would have said ‘the kind of code where you read only certain words’ or some similar drivel.”

Mary purses her lips. “I knew it would give me away.”

“What gave _me_ away?” Sherlock lifts his chin briefly, indicating the gun. “You’ve been expecting this. How long have you been running around with a gun in your handbag?”

“Longer than I thought I’d have to,” she fires back. “Of course I’ve been expecting this. With that suspicious unscheduled audit at Harry’s work? With poor Bill Murray getting shipped out four months early so that his nasty little gambling habit wouldn’t get his friends in trouble? Not hard to smell a rat. Though you weren’t as quick as I expected.”

“Still quicker than you hoped,” Sherlock smirks. “That’s why you rushed the wedding, isn’t it?”

Mary cocks her head to the side, as if contemplating the best angle for the entry wound. “So this _is_ about John after all. Do you think this will help you get him back? Have him all for yourself?”

Sherlock lowers his eyes for a moment and when he lifts them again, he’s not smiling any more. “I’m not part of the equation, Mary. The goal is to keep John safe _from you_.”

“How selfless.” Mary’s mouth is one downward-turned, unhappy line. “Then put this into your equation: I’m not a threat to John.”

“Your blackmailer is,” Sherlock remarks.

“That bastard–” For the first time, Mary’s grip on the gun wavers slightly. “I know what he has on me. He knows I know. If he ever tries anything, I’ll kill him without any qualms. You know what a worm he is. _You know_ that people like him should be killed.”

She draws a deep breath and puts the gun back into her handbag, leaning comfortably against the seat as if the image of it between their faces a mere moment ago was just an illusion. “I won’t let him touch John again.”

Sherlock seems to accept this, the slight tension which is an instinctive reaction of every human who finds themselves staring down a barrel leaving his shoulders. Their faces remain a pair of masks mirroring each other with their calculated coldness. Yet there is a difference. The machine-like face looks like a façade on Mary, smoothing the smile crinkles around her eyes and erasing the laugh lines from the shining expression that feels so natural with her. Sherlock, on the other hand, only ever puts on a pleasant face for a case; and this carefully sculpted, impenetrable perfection he’s wearing now is what he really looks like.

“Ex-CIA sniper, internationally wanted killer for hire, trying to leave that life behind. Why didn’t you come to me in the first place?” Sherlock asks. It’s warzone strategy they’re using now: first scare the enemy and drive him into hiding with a substantial bombardment, show your strength, and then carefully begin to secure your side of the battlefront.

“You would have told John,” Mary replies. No white flag on her side of the trenches. “And I can’t let you do that. I _won’t_ let you do that. I love him.”

“And yet you’ve let him love a lie?”

“It’s not–” Mary stirs on the seat, then settles again. “Not everything is a lie. The nurse Morstan, yes, that’s what John wanted. But me – I am what he _really_ needs.”

“Two entirely different things,” Sherlock finishes her quote, “encompassed in one woman. Ideal.”

“Thank you,” Mary smirks. She doesn’t sound grateful.

“You could have trusted John. Let him make his choice with his eyes open.”

“Oh, _you_ can talk!” Her smirk widens when she observes Sherlock biting his lip. Point scored.

“But you can trust me,” she adds. Her practiced smile, the one that she wears daily, the smile of a _professional nurse_ , morphs on her face, leaving behind only the _professional._ “I’m not your enemy, Sherlock. But I swear, I will kill you if you become mine.”

It’s equally terrifying and fascinating how her tone can switch from soft and imploring to cold and menacing between two sentences.

Sherlock straightens his spine, unimpressed by the threat. “Just one last question, Mary: Was John an assignment?”

“What?”

Sherlock seizes on her startled reaction and presses his momentary advantage. “Were you put into his office on purpose? Were you told to date him? Ordered to make him fall in love with you? By whom?”

Mary’s eyes narrow. “Let me tell you something, Sherlock. John chose me _. He_ asked me out, _he_ suggested a second date, _he_ moved into my place, _he_ proposed to me. I’m his choice, and nothing you do now will make him choose you.”

The muscles on Sherlock’s jaw line twitch but otherwise he doesn’t even blink. “You haven’t answered my question.”

“That’s enough.” John slides open the partition, taking off the dark shades and turning towards the back of the car. There’s a small screen on the dashboard in front of him, showing the image of the passenger interior transmitted from a small camera masked in the handgrip of the door on Mary’s left.

“Because I don’t want to hear the answer anyway.”

For a few seconds, it’s as if John is still watching the scene in the back of the car on his screen but has pressed the Pause button. The stilled image trembles slightly, the tape stuck in tiny jerky movements, itching to be released again. The actors of the scene are shaking with suppressed tension but every move is forbidden to them. It gives John a heady feeling of control, this fantasy, and he grasps onto it for a moment while he watches the rest of his reality crumble and fall into a thousand little pieces.

Mary isn’t even breathing. She just sits, frozen with shock, her big eyes brimming with tears and reminding John of uncovered mass graves, too small for all those bodies stuffed inside, hideous pits full of misery and despair. Sherlock isn’t looking directly at him, his head half-turned and the word _John_ caught on his lips. There might be a world outside the car, streets full of people huddled against the cold, passing by this vehicle without having the slightest idea that something inside has just _ended_ , and John doesn’t care. In his mind, he reaches for the Play button.

“I’m getting out.”

He’s out of the door and six steps down the pavement when a strong hand on his shoulder stops him.

“John–” Sherlock actually recoils from the expression John levels at him. John knows how he looks right now; he caught the reflection of his own face in the rear mirror before he escaped the vacuum of the car, desperate for air. If Mary’s eyes were graves, his own are a wasteland, empty skies from where all birds have been struck by lightning, falling dead into the ashes on the ground.

“We need to know the answer, John,” Sherlock finds his tongue at last. “If there is a link to–”

John throws his head back. “ _We?_ Who’s that? You and Mycroft? Is this it? The _case_ you’ve been working on?”

“ _You_ need to know,” Sherlock says quietly.

“Thanks, but no.” The words are burning coals in his sore throat but he has to force them out. “It doesn’t matter, do you understand? It doesn’t change anything. She’s–” he gestures towards the back of the car where Mary still sits like a convict awaiting the sentence.

“So she lied to me about her past. Well, she can join the sodding club! Everyone lies to me,” John finishes, choking on his own bitter laughter. “I should get used to that instead of blaming her for being no exception.”

“This is important, John.”

John shakes his head. It feels almost good, watching Sherlock’s exasperation taking over the last bits of his patience.

“No, Sherlock. You wanted to do this for me? Then do something _I_ want. Not your way. Not this time. My way, Sherlock. And I don’t want to know if she was assigned to me or not. I don’t want to know, do you understand? _Ever._ ”

Sherlock looks at him sadly. The words _I will find out_ are written in the knit of his eyebrows, in the set of his jaw. John stares back, letting _I won’t help you_ seep through the wrinkles on his forehead and the lines around his mouth.

On the periphery of his vision John sees Mary getting out of the car and coming to stand awkwardly by the rear door. Will she be allowed to go home now? Or are there more black-clad men hidden around the corner, waiting to take her somewhere to tell Mycroft everything she knows? Will she be granted freedom again when she promises to be a good puppet and lets the Holmes brothers pull her strings? John feels bile rising in his throat and he turns towards her, fingers twitching with the need to wipe the resigned expression off her face.

“John...” Sherlock clear his throat. “Just in case, if you need... there’s still your room at Baker Street.”

John pauses. Very slowly, he turns back, and when he lifts his face to look at Sherlock, the man takes an involuntary step back.

“She was right, wasn’t she?” John begins in a low voice. “All’s well that ends well? You and me, back at Baker Street, as if you never–” he swallows against the word that still refuses to be said aloud, “–as if you never _left_ , all sins atoned by saving me _again_ from – from what? From a woman who actually _means me well_?”

“It doesn’t matter to you what she–?”

“You don’t get to control my life like that, Sherlock!” John shouts, forgetting the street around him. “You don’t get to be here and then disappear and come back again and move us around your fucking chessboard like pieces in your precious game.”

“Fine.” Sherlock keeps his distance but his face is still determined. “I’m not asking you to come back. You don’t have to forgive me, I don’t expect you to forget anything, I just... thought that you might need somewhere to stay. A little time. To think.”

“Drop the act. Selfless doesn’t suit you.”

“I miss you, John.” It’s spoken so quietly, like a snowflake crystallised out of thin air and melting again before it reaches the ground, that John almost misses it. Almost.

“Why is Quentin there, then?”

Sherlock huffs impatiently. “Quentin is my minder. An assistant. He’s not my... partner.”

John narrows his eyes at him. “Minder, huh? On duty? Oh, that’s rich.” He spares a brief glance at Mary. “That’s why you think she’s been assigned to me? Well, here’s a fact for you, Sherlock: some of us _can_ love, and _can_ be loved back, and just because you clearly have no fucking idea about the concept you don’t have the right to–” John runs out of breath and when he draws the next, it feels like a mouthful of freezing water.

“So what’s wrong with Quentin? Did he get tired of you already? Doesn’t he call you brilliant often enough? Tell me, Sherlock, are you shagging him to keep him there?”

Something breaks between them, like a string pulled taut that finally gave in to the strain and snapped, both ends recoiling back like whips. John feels the crack in his chest, pain so sharp that he will be surprised that there isn’t a long red mark on his skin when he takes his shirt off in the evening, and he can watch the fracture extending from where his heart is bleeding all the way to Sherlock– only he can’t see the other end, he can’t see the corresponding wound because Sherlock’s eyes are glazed with frost and his spine is straight and proud and his voice belongs to a machine.

“If you should want any additional information regarding this case, you know where to find me. Good day, John.”

Sherlock turns and walks away, measured strides that carry him down the pavement and around the corner in seconds. A man in a suit emerges out of nowhere, gets in the car and drives it away. John and Mary are left standing on the street, a couple of metres and the two months remaining until the wedding hovering between them, and John can’t decide whether it’s a border or a bridge.

 

*

 

There’s a phone ringing somewhere in the living room. Sherlock rolls onto his belly and buries his head under the pillow. Sometimes he should remember to close the door to his bedroom, he thinks peevishly, because now he can’t ignore his flat-mate’s soft padding through the adjoining room, he can’t unhear the rustle of papers and some clutter scattering on the floor as Quentin searches through the mess, and he can’t pretend to still be asleep when Quentin comes into the bedroom with the offending device in hand and a suggestively raised eyebrow. Sherlock sits up and glares. It’s early afternoon, and he just wrapped up a private case late last night.

“It’s your brother.”

“Tell me a reason I _should_ be picking up,” Sherlock grumbles, swiping his thumb over the screen and falling backwards into the pillows.

“What do you want?”

 _“Why are you still in bed? At this hour?”_ Damn Mycroft, not missing the soft _flop_ Sherlock’s head made on the bedding.

“Don’t worry, you haven’t interrupted anything except my well-deserved rest.” Quentin’s other eyebrow joins the first and he shakes his head at Sherlock in a silent reprimand. Sherlock smirks.

_“I need your decision, Sherlock, as a matter of urgency.”_

 “Decision?”

_“Even at the eleventh hour it’s not too late, you know.”_

“It’s nearly one o’clock, Mycroft.”

_“Cars can be ordered, private jets commandeered.”_

Sherlock sighs. “No, Mycroft, I won’t be coming to the wedding. Contrary to popular belief, I do not enjoy hanging around where I’m not welcome.”

_“I remember you receiving an invitation.”_

“A courtesy gesture, and entirely Mary’s idea. Her handwriting, and the invitation smelled of the pastilles she carries in her work handbag which means she probably sneaked it from under John’s nose.”

_“I think you should reconsider. There should always be a spectre at the feast.”_

Yes, Sherlock thinks. He would definitely be the spectre at the feast, always lurking within sight of the newlywed couple, spoiling their happy day as a physical reminder of the truth behind it, the truth that John deliberately decided to ignore.

They haven’t exchanged a word since that January afternoon. After the revelation, John went home with Mary only to pack a couple of things and then he went to his sister’s. He took some leave from work, turned off his phone, and after a week he went back home and carried on as if nothing had happened. Sherlock doesn’t know what John could have discussed with Mary, what he might have demanded to know. They might have not talked about it at all.

It hurt. John’s words, cutting and cruel, driven by anger at the betrayal and months of bottled-up resentment at Sherlock’s return, they hurt deeply and their sting lasted for days. But in a way, they were also liberating. Sherlock had done what he deemed best and his feathers turned pitch black for his trouble, yes. But in a world where people divide into friends, enemies, and bystanders, Sherlock is finally able to label John as a bystander and effectively dismiss every concern about John’s well-being from his mind. It sharpens his brain and eases the labour on the case, and if Sherlock hasn’t slept with Quentin ever since, he can blame it on the workload and the need to concentrate. 

His brother’s voice brings Sherlock back to the present. _“You should see it. It’s a lovely wedding, as they say. Very tastefully organised.”_

Sherlock wants to snap at him for the deliberate prodding at the still smarting wound but then he realises what his brother is actually saying. His eyes narrow. “How do _you_ know?”

_“Did you really think that I would leave my most important link in the chain unguarded for a whole day? One of my men is among the party. Posing as a photographer but I’ve been assured that his photographs are actually quite good.”_

“Didn’t they grow suspicious about the last minute change?”

_“That was actually rather interesting. Their original photographer had fallen mysteriously ill and we had to get rid of the substitute. He refused to be bribed and reacted quite violently when we made him relinquish his position to our man. We ran a background check and found out that this substitute was hired under a false identity and that his real name is Jonathan Small, a brother of one of the men killed under Major James Sholto’s command.”_

“Oh.”

_“Yes, quite. I’m considering sending the good Major a little ‘You’re welcome’ card after this business is over.”_

Sherlock grins. “Mycroft. You prevented a murder at John’s wedding. That’s why they call you a spoilsport.”

He tries to imagine how the murderer would go about it if it wasn’t for Mycroft’s intervention. Poison? Unlikely. Trays of drinks circulating, and Sholto is probably accustomed to watching his glass. Shooting? Stabbing? Impossible, the murder would have been discovered instantly. How had the man planned to get out unnoticed? He wasn’t reckless enough just to kill and to hell with the consequences. He didn’t just barge in and shoot, he made a false identity to mingle with the crowd, he was clever. Sholto wasn’t sociable but he would have wanted to honour John’s wedding with his presence, he would have wanted to delight John with the reminder of the old days, he would have put on his ceremonial uniform... uniform with a tight belt, not unlike the kind the Guardsmen at the Palace wear–

Sherlock gasps.

“Mycroft, that’s brilliant. I just solved another case.”

 _“It’s good to see you on top form,”_ comes the sarcastic reply from the other end of the line.

“With your man in place and every eventuality no doubt covered, why are you calling me?”

_“Because of one very interesting feature that is the Chief Bridesmaid.”_

Sherlock sits up again. “A good friend of Mary’s, I presume. Since all her friends have known her less than five years, I do not see how–”

The smugness in Mycroft’s voice is nearly dripping out of the phone screen. _“...whose name is Janine Hawkins. I believe you remember her.”_

“Yes.” Sherlock gets up and starts pacing up and down the bedroom.

 _“It seems that Miss Morstan – oh, pardon me for being out of date, of course it’s Mrs. Watson now–”_ Sherlock prays the sound of gritted teeth doesn’t carry through the line, _“–has befriended her only recently but they must have got on exceptionally well if she made her her Chief Bridesmaid. I suppose it was not only for Miss Hawkins’ formidable organising skills even though the wedding really is a success.”_

“Do you think Mary is manipulating her to get access to Magnussen?”

_“It’s a reasonable assumption. Even though Doctor Watson has been informed about her past and still married her, she must still fear for her freedom. Magnussen could send her to jail.”_

“What do you suggest?”

_“I suggest, brother mine, that you should dust off your nice manners and get in touch with the beautiful Miss Hawkins. We can’t let Mrs. Watson loose after her own agenda.”_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "I'm not your enemy, Sherlock. But I will kill you if you become mine."


	7. Never Over You

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The game is never over.

Marriage wasn’t supposed to change a person, not really, John thought. They’d lived together before, had their ‘ups and downs’, to put it mildly, and if anything, he expected that the wedding would make Mary feel safer. Happier.

It could be just him, he tries to reason with himself. Even though he’d decided to accept Mary without question, even though he told her that it was her future that mattered to him, not her past, it’s only natural that he would become... suspicious. A bit. At times. Because Mary certainly didn’t become secretive overnight...or has she always been like that? Going out to meet people she vaguely mentions by their first names, she has lots of friends after all, and John realises he doesn’t really know any of them. When did her reasons for coming home late begin to sound more like excuses?

In the end, it doesn’t even take a month for John to start considering taking up Sherlock’s offer.

 _‘If you should want any additional information regarding this case...’_ That’s what Sherlock said to him, instead of telling John to fuck off. John hates the things he said to Sherlock that day. He hates a lot of things that he did or has simply let happen lately. He wonders how long Sherlock will hold the door open for him, how many times he will reach out only to get his hand burnt.

It’s on a morning of his day off when John arrives at 221B Baker Street. Mrs. Hudson answers the door and John is startled when he’s met with a stern face instead of her usual delight at seeing him.

“Is Sherlock – is everything all right?”

She lets him in, muttering something to herself that John doesn’t catch. As she’s about to leave on some errand of her own, she calls out after him. “You know, John, I sometimes wish I never let you rent this place.”

Well, so much for encouragement.

He trots up the stairs and is about to raise his hand to knock on the flat door when it opens from the other side. The prepared words of greeting die unsaid on his lips. His jaw drops a little and he does a double-take at the figure in the door frame.

 “Janine?”

“Hey, John,” she drawls in that sweet voice of hers that flows over vowels like golden honey. She tosses her hair back from one shoulder and adjusts the strap of her bag. John watches, dumbfounded, as her fingers casually slip in the bag something that looks suspiciously like spare set of keys to 221B.

“Um... Is Sherlock here?” Of all the questions John wants to ask, this one makes the least sense but it’s the safest to actually say aloud.

“Oh, sure.” She looks over her shoulder. “He’ll be a minute, he just got into the shower.” She winks at John and gestures towards the stairs. “Going to pop down to Speedy’s to fetch some breakfast, fancy something too?”

Before John can summon words that wouldn’t betray his bewilderment over his wife’s best friend fetching breakfast for Sherlock Holmes, the man himself emerges into the living room, bare feet jutting from suit trouser legs, fingers busy buttoning up his shirt.

“Hello, John.”

John expects something. Surprise at this unexpected visit, maybe embarrassment over this– this– John can’t even begin to describe this woman who acts like she owns the flat – maybe some open hostility, God knows John would deserve that. He doesn’t expect... nothing. Sherlock’s face could be sculpted in wax and put in Madame Tussaud’s right away, it expresses absolutely nothing.

“Oh, Sherl! That _was_ a lighting fast shower.” John blinks and resists the urge to bang his head against the door frame. Maybe if he hit his head hard enough, he would stop seeing things. Hearing things. Like, for example, Sherlock coming up to rest his hand on Janine’s hip and her drawling voice, like a cat meowing over a bowl full of cream.

It was disconcerting enough to meet Sherlock with Quentin at the bar on his stag night, but that one was at least distantly understandable. John never knew for sure but he always suspected. But this – this flirtatious girl pawing at the man who once said that girlfriends weren’t his area–

“I’m sorry, no breakfast for me,” Sherlock says to her, puppy eyes in a regretful face as if missing a meal with her amounts to a disaster of international scale. “New evidence in that Norbury case, Lestrade just texted. Gotta dash. Are you in work today?”

“Yeah,” she nods. “You can pick me up at nine if that new evidence doesn’t blow up our dinner plans as well.”

“Wouldn’t allow that,” Mr. ‘Married-to-My-Work’ winks.

John is about to remind them that he’s still here when Sherlock tilts his head and kisses Janine soundly on the mouth. John swallows. Okay. One question – about the precise nature of their relationship – has just answered itself, and about two hundred and forty three others just popped into his mind.

“Sorry, John, won’t keep you any longer!” Janine laughs cheerfully. “By the way, pity Sherlock here wasn’t at your wedding. I keep wondering what seeing him in a tux would do to my knees,” she adds in a dreamy tone.

“You know what I’m like, darling,” Sherlock answers readily. “John wanted to spare me being around too many people.” His tone is light, the corners of his mouth upturned in an easy smile, but his head is thrown back haughtily and in his eyes is a challenge that John knows better than to fight. He bows his head and fixes his eyes on the carpet.

“Of course,” she smiles back. “I’m the only one who really knows what you’re like, remember?”

They exchange two more kitten kisses, noses brushing. John may crawl out of his skin with that damned _intimacy_. He has an urgent matter, sod it–

“Solve me a crime, Sherlock Holmes,” Janine purrs and thankfully, at last, she’s gone. Sherlock turns on his heel and goes back into the flat as if he just shooed away a fly. John forces his feet to carry him in as well, even as he treads more cautiously than he did back in Afghanistan upon seeing a landmine zone warning.

“Well?” Sherlock prompts him. “I assume you’re here to find out about who’s blackmailing Mary. I’m afraid I can’t–”

“Dinner?” John interrupts him, his brain still spinning over the scene he just witnessed.

“What?” Sherlock pauses in his tracks. “Oh, that.” He scoffs. “Before you jump to the wrong conclusion, let me assure you that I’m not whoring myself for company, as you put it so neatly last time.”

John swallows. Closes his eyes tightly. “Sorry,” he mutters. “Shouldn’t have said... that.”

Sherlock turns his back on him, pushing aside the curtain to look out of the window.

“So she’s your....?” John ventures.

“I believe that’s none of your business.”

A realisation dawns on John. “You’re dating her for a case. Jesus. Will you _ever_ understand that manipulating people’s emotions–”

“People who live in glass houses should not throw stones,” Sherlock says archly. “Don’t teach me morals, John, or I’ll remind you exactly how many people Mary killed, for profit.”

“Leave my wife out of this,” John says in a low voice.

“So? Isn’t she the reason you’re here?”

“I mean it,” John continues. “Leave that case of hers, Sherlock. I _thought_ something was going on, making her nervous, and that’s why I came – only to find you sniffing around my wife’s best friend! ”

“You have no right to tell me what case I am allowed to take on–”

“I God damn it _have_ the right to tell you to fuck off where my wife is concerned!” John shouts.

To his surprise, Sherlock’s eyes widen slightly and then immediately narrow as if he just stumbled upon a revelation.

“You keep saying that,” he remarks as if to himself. “Not ‘Mary’, not ‘she’... only ever ‘my wife’.”

“Yes, my wife!” John bellows. “I bloody married her!”

The words bounce off the mirror and scatter on the floor between them. John is breathing heavily. Sherlock, the bastard, _smirks_.

“You should have fired that therapist,” he says. John fails to see the connection to their current conversation, or rather, budding fight.

“What?”

“You don’t have _trust_ issues.” Sherlock is almost laughing, as if he has suddenly found the answer to a problem that has pestered him for months. “Or rather, you have them, but they’re only secondary. What you really have is _control issues._ ”

John just stares. Sherlock is nearly dancing, the flow of words out of his mouth picking up speed and urgency.

“It doesn’t matter to you if you can trust people as long as you can control them. Control the influence they have on you, control the extent of attachment you create for them. You chose Mary, you courted her, you proposed, and when you found out about her it was entirely up to you if you took her back or not – and you took her, because you could! Because you didn’t _have to_ , because you didn’t _owe her_ anything. She lied to you but it didn’t matter, because you don’t need to trust, you need to control, and there she was, the one who was waiting, and you were the one making the decision.”

Sherlock is getting closer to him with every sentence, speaking directly into his face. There’s light in his eyes that John can’t face down even though it’s blinding him.

“But you couldn’t control me, could you? I just happened. You had no say; one day you were an invalided, jobless, purposeless man, and the next day you were solving crimes, and the excitement was just too good to let go, wasn’t it? You didn’t choose it, you just got pulled into the stream, and so you decided to trust it because it felt so damn good. You _like_ it when someone’s turning your life around. Your controlled, perfect life – it gets boring in the end, doesn’t it? Because _having_ is not quite the same as _wanting_ , John.

“And then I left you,” Sherlock continues. “And you didn’t even see it coming. _You_ were always prepared to settle down with the first suitable woman and move out of Baker Street and _leave me_ but suddenly _I left you_ and you hated me for it, for taking the decision out of your hands.”

Sherlock is crowding well into John’s personal space now, he’s so close that their chests would be touching if John as much as heaved a deep breath but he can’t, his breath is stuck in his lungs, dragged down by the weight of the words that he can’t squeeze out, and Sherlock isn’t stopping–

“And then I made it even worse by coming back.” His voice drops into a suggestive rumble. “Just when you were ready to move on, the call of the old days was back. I’m like a drug, aren’t I? But you didn’t want me like that again, because I could always leave and hurt you again, you didn’t want to lose your control this time. You wanted me to come to you, begging for forgiveness, and when you _finally_ forgave me, it would be perfect – our friendship on _your_ terms. You could have cases when you felt like it, and domestic bliss with Mary for the rest of the time. And I would have been _grateful_ for it, I would have been _desperate_ for every crumb–”

 _Shut up_ , John wants to scream but words have failed him and he lifts his hand, half-blind, willing his fingers to ball into a fist but they’re slow with shock, too slow, or Sherlock is too close, because instead of hitting that hateful face John’s hand closes itself on a handful of dark curls and instead of pushing away he tugs them closer and that cruel mouth is right there–

Sherlock has stopped talking. That’s the first coherent thought that pushes through the mist in John’s brain as he realises he has Sherlock’s bottom lip between his teeth and that he can taste blood, coppery and warm and _alive_ , that Sherlock’s breath is coming in ragged huffs across his cheekbone as he gives as good as he gets, desperate kisses verging on bites, blood smearing between their lips, fighting even now. Then Sherlock grabs him by the shoulders and shoves him away a bit, dropping his head to look him directly in the eyes.

“You can’t control me, John,” he breathes out, a pearl of fresh blood forming on his lip. “I would do anything for you, but not out of guilt. Not as a penance.”

John just shakes his head, one last token protest against something he still hasn’t found the words for, and he cups Sherlock’s face in both his hands and brings him closer and Sherlock meets him halfway and it’s gentler this time, conscious and deliberate, this time John can feel every nerve ending in his lips and mouth firing up with the smell and taste and feel of Sherlock, and he pours everything he cannot say into that kiss, weeks of discontent, months of resentment, years of denial, he lets it flow out, all that weight directly from his lungs and finally, finally he can breathe again.

“I should have done this the night you came back,” John says when they part at last. He can barely recognise his own voice.

“I should have done this the night before I went away,” Sherlock replies, pressing their foreheads together. The sharp, blinding light in his eyes has softened, dimmed, and it’s glowing almost sadly now, like a candle lit in the dark of a church in remembrance of things lost forever.

“Would it change anything?” John laughs bitterly, already knowing the answer. Sherlock confirms it with a shake of his head.

“It would only hurt more. Being away from you and knowing–” 

“You were right, that night at the Landmark – the second one.” John lifts his hand to Sherlock’s lip, touching the cut. It’s still bleeding a little. “You had no chance of knowing that you were my best friend. You were so much more – so much more – and I didn’t want to show it, I didn’t even want to see it myself – I was hiding it, and I was hiding too much. Everything.”

The reality begins to seep back in and John laughs again, forcing back the wet sting in his eyes.

“And I hated you, yeah, I did, for leaving. For _dying_. But I hated myself more, for figuring out what you meant to me when it was already too late. The biggest bloody failure of my life. And I still hate you for coming back, because I could have lived with that failure, I could have learned how to forgive myself and carry on, but then you came back just when I thought I had finally let you go and I couldn’t just forget my mistake, not with you right there, rubbing it in–”

Sherlock doesn’t tell him that it’s not too late now. They both know it is. There’s a ring on John’s left hand, digging sharply into his flesh under the grip of Sherlock’s hand on his, and there is a series of mistakes and fatal decisions that can’t be undone by a single kiss.

There’s a sound of someone clearing their throat at the door and John nearly jumps out of his skin.

“Glad to see you worked it out.” Quentin closes the door behind him. “Hate to interrupt but we’ve got work to do, Will.”

Sherlock lifts his gaze from John’s but doesn’t let go of his hand. John has to tug it out of his grasp. The ring chafes on the soft skin between his fingers and John suddenly feels as if the attention of everyone in the room is upon his wedding band, branding his finger with a ring of fire, and he sticks his hand in his pocket in a vain attempt to hide it. It is still too tight, too hot. He takes a few steps away from his– it’s hard to tell what Sherlock is now.

Definitely not a friend.

In some ways, John feels more inclined to think of him as a enemy. You shouldn’t have to be afraid of your friend, you shouldn’t be acutely aware of how and how much your friend can hurt you.

Sherlock wipes the blood off his mouth with the back of his hand but otherwise he remains rooted to the spot, a trace of hesitancy in his face as if he’s torn between following John, walking over to Quentin, or simply going into the kitchen and faking nonchalance about the whole situation. Quentin decides that for him. He comes to lean against the mantelpiece, standing closer to Sherlock than to John, the triangle of their relative positions sending John a clear message.

The living room registers with John properly for the first time since he entered and he notices that his old armchair by the fireplace is gone. It feels like another part of the message. Somehow, this little detail kicks John back on track.

“Tell me about Mary,” he insists.

Sherlock shakes his head. “Can’t.”

“You offered before.”

“That was before you married her, John.” Quentin throws in the explanation with an air of a teacher explaining a basic fact for the hundredth time. John clenches his hand in the pocket. Last time he met Quentin he felt like the punch line of a joke Quentin was making – now it’s even worse, now he’s feeling like a rabbit in the magician’s hat, unaware of the trick and staring, stupefied, at the audience that laughs upon his appearance on the scene.

“Go home, John.”

It takes John two seconds to realise what is wrong with that sentence. _Go home_ , says Sherlock standing in the middle of 221B Baker Street, which is _not_ John’s home, hasn’t been for two years now, and where John is no longer welcome. Hell, he doesn’t even have a chair here any more.

Sherlock may love him but the Work will always come first. Which is fine because John doesn’t _want_ to love Sherlock.

“You’re leaving me out of the picture, I get that. But why can’t you just leave us alone?”

“Go home to Mary,” Sherlock says more insistently. “Look after her.”

“What’s this – bloody relationship advice?”

“Don’t let her out of your sight,” Sherlock continues, ignoring the interruption. “It’s important, John.”

 _Oh_. “Anything else?”

Sherlock shakes his head wordlessly. John nods once. It’s not what he came for but it’s something. He turns on his heel, pointedly ignoring Quentin’s stare, and marches out of the door.

Back on the street he looks up and down for a cab but then he catches a glimpse of someone familiar through the window of Speedy’s. There’s Janine, alone at a table and nibbling on the remnants of her breakfast. On an impulse, John enters the café and takes the seat opposite her.

“John!” She seems delighted to see him again. “Got hungry after all?” Before he can open his mouth to answer, she puts a hand on his arm. “Wanted to ask you – don’t tell Mary yet. I mean, about me and Sherl. I feel kinda bad for her there.”

“Why?”

She smiles apologetically. “Well, I think she just wanted to be on good terms with the best pal of her husband – you know how it goes, John – and she’s been bringing him up a lot, you know? Always – ‘what if Sherlock comes to the wedding’ and ‘John would love this new case of Sherlock’s’ – she even follows his website! So I naturally got... curious. About what’s so stellar about him.”

She sips on her coffee and grimaces. “I hate this place. Anyway, when Sherlock came over to my work to interview my boss for that Milverton case – did you hear about it?”

John did. The case made the news, even though it didn’t quite hit the front pages. The late  Lord Milverton bequeathed his highly valued library and personal archive to his old family friend whose name was not made public. Some of the other heirs contested the will, claiming that it must have been made under duress. John is a bit surprised to hear that Sherlock has been interested in it. It’s barely a three.

“As I said, he came to my office and the sparks just flew,” Janine chats happily. John barely manages to conceal a smirk even though really he feels sorry for her. Then she notices her watch and her eyes widen. “Blimey. Gonna be late.” She finishes her coffee and pulls on her cardigan.  

“Just don’t want to make Mary jealous,” she continues hastily. “She tried so hard to stay in touch with him. But I guess marriage changes things, doesn’t it? Things cool down a bit between friends, at least ’til the newlyweds settle down and begin to see that there are more people in the world than their loved one.”

“Yeah,” John answers noncommittally. “Been on a case with him?”

“Not yet,” she pulls a face and collects her phone and her purse, “but I’d like to! He’s just so clever, isn’t he? He’s so funny when he gets excited about a murder. Dancing around like a spark.”

She gets up, giving John a confidential smile. “And I just love to watch him dance. Gotta dash, my boss hates it when I’m late! Bye!”

John gapes. He attempts to hide it but he can’t clamp down on his shock nearly quickly enough. Luckily, Janine is already on her way out, not looking back.

_Solve me a crime, Sherlock Holmes._

Oh Christ.

John feels fear sinking low in his stomach that he won’t get home quickly enough.

The cabbie is throwing him looks in the rear mirror, clearly uneasy about the way John is all but jumping on the seat and nearly growling in frustration at every red light. Wishing in vain for the morning rush hour traffic to dissolve faster around them, John tries to calm down and attempts to bring some order and sense to the scant information he’s got.

Fact number one: Moriarty tried to destroy Sherlock using people close to him. Here John stops and, for honesty’s sake, corrects himself: Moriarty at least partially succeeded in that. Faking his suicide, Sherlock might have won the Game but he lost other things, things that John had been keeping from him ever since. It feels as if John finished what Moriarty began and it’s a sickening thought. John now realises that the more he refused to become what felt like a pawn in the Holmes brothers’ scheme, the more he was unconsciously playing into their enemy’s hands. He understands now that the game is never over and there’s no escape from it – and the only thing that can raise his odds is to become a consenting player.

John recalls how Mary was trying her best to reconcile him with Sherlock, back when her secret was still a secret. Why was she risking exposure, acting against her own best interest? Why did she continue nudging John towards Sherlock even after the revelation of her past, when she had every reason to resent Sherlock for nearly thwarting her plans for a quiet life?

Fact number two: Mary was being blackmailed. She probably still is. For what? Nobody just makes a threat and then mercifully forgoes gaining from it. John would have noticed if there was money inexplicably going missing from their household. Mary doesn’t have influential friends...

Wait. John asks himself: what was Mary really _doing_ when she tried to make John friends with Sherlock?

He thought at first that she was doing it for him, to lift the combined weight of guilt and unforgiveness from his heart. Now it occurs to John that the sole purpose of her endeavour was purely and simply to make John and Sherlock friends again. Giving Sherlock back his weakness. Making him vulnerable, open to attack.

Fact number three: Mary didn’t even know Janine six months ago but suddenly the two were getting on like a house on fire, to the point of Mary making Janine her Chief Bridesmaid. Mary is friendly and sociable, yes, but even she is usually more reserved than that.

Fact number four: Taking on a mediocre case, Sherlock has in fact sought the first opportunity to meet Janine. He’s fooling her on purpose – probably in order to get access to someone else through her. The careless way he’s faking his interest in her – even John was able to see through the charade – is obvious enough proof that she’s not his primary target.

Fact number five: Janine is no fool. John can’t imagine that a woman as attractive as she is, a proper city girl, maybe a little shallow but with shrewd business-like brains, wouldn’t be able to tell from experience whether or not a man is genuinely head over heels for her.

Sherlock believes that with the death of Moriarty and the elimination of his syndicate the name and its legacy have been wiped off the face of the Earth once and for all.

Sherlock might be walking into a trap.

“We’re ’ere, sir,” the cabbie calls out. John hands over the fare and wills himself to walk home at a leisurely pace, like a man on his day off.

It’s Mary’s day off too but the house is empty.

There’s a scrap of paper on the kitchen table. A note in Mary’s handwriting, the precise and unhurried script of a professional nurse.

_Going onto brunch with Janine, might go and have a look at the sales with her later. xxx_

It’s a perfectly innocent looking message except for the fact that John has just seen Janine having breakfast and heard her saying that she would be at work for the whole of today.

 _Don’t let her out of your sight_ , Sherlock told him.

Too late.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "He's so clever, isn't he? _And I just love to watch him dance._ "


	8. Three Seconds of Consciousness

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> John makes his decision.

**_Three_ **

It doesn’t hurt as much as it should. The initial sensation is more one of impact than of pain, the momentum carried by the small bullet barely moving him, the flesh giving way almost immediately. It burns, a wave of hotness spreading through his chest, and that’s when the shock kicks in, flooding his blood system with endorphins, and nothing hurts after that.

Something creaks in his chest, though, when he tries to breathe in. The bullet must have shattered his breastbone. He gasps for air, once, and it’s accompanied by a sickening, wheezing sound. Pneumothorax, brilliant. He’s going to die by asphyxiation sooner than he bleeds out.

Endorphins are a wonderful thing. Pupil dilation makes everything seem suffused with light, contours blurred and glowing. Amidst all the shine there’s a single clear-cut figure, small and slender in black gear and black knit cap, the hand with the gun still raised and eyes wide and uncomprehending–

“Oh my God,” she says, the sound coming to him as if through deep waters, “oh my God,” and her voice is empty like the bullet casing that clinked softly against the floor a second ago. 

He feels trembling hands on him, at once afraid to touch and desperate to grip, fingers skimming over his chest, grasping his face, lifting his eye-lids, and he hears a strange sound, a single syllable repeated over and over like a church bell chiming in the distance, or a heartbeat – only more insistent than his own. His own is a lost cause, it’s a wilting, pathetic excuse for a heartbeat, erratic and getting lazier by the second.  

John feels laughter bubble up in his chest along with the blood and it escapes through the wrong opening, through the one extra hole that’s in his body now. He manages a grin, licks the blood from his teeth and his eyes lock onto Sherlock’s staring at him from above.

“I guess we’re even now.”

 

**_An hour earlier_ **

Sherlock’s phone number has been unavailable all day– John has been ringing him over and over for hours – and it’s this fact that makes John really worried. Sherlock is addicted to checking his phone; he wouldn’t stay out of signal for so long. John regrets not having Mycroft’s number. He erased it when he thought that Sherlock was dead, believing he would never need to contact him again. When Sherlock returned to London, John didn’t have time – or any particular wish – to ask for the current one.

Mary wasn’t at the gym she likes to visit on her days off. She’s not having lunch at her favourite place either. Her phone is turned off, probably to prevent tracking. John wonders what her excuse will be when she comes home later and pretends she didn’t outright lie about where she was. The battery died, sorry love, were you worried?

John tries to call some of her friends but the result is nil. Nobody’s seen her. John even bites down on his pride and calls David, Mary’s ex. He always suspected that David never really let go of his crush on Mary and she was always happy to see him. In the light of recent events, what if their meeting weren’t just about a shoulder to cry on? What if David is somehow connected to Mary’s sinister past? But David is not even in town. His landlord picks up the landline and tells John that David is on a week-long business trip to Ireland.

John would use the Homeless Network to help him locate her – or Sherlock – but the machinery that Sherlock kept so well-oiled with grand tips turns a blind eye on John. It could be that there are new people on the streets, different than the ones John saw once or twice in his days with Sherlock, and back then John never paid particular attention to the faces behind the dirt. John visits a few of the old places – under Waterloo bridge, deep inside the Vauxhall Arches, and a couple more. He spends nearly all day looking for the proverbial needle in a haystack. The homeless people don’t seem to know him, they don’t remember him as Sherlock’s assistant. Maybe they would recognise Quentin but not John...

Quentin. He’s probably with Sherlock now, wherever it is. They had work to do. John doesn’t have his number either but Quentin lives at Baker Street. There must be something in the flat that would help John locate them both. If Sherlock remained true to his habits and didn’t lock his computer before leaving the flat... Sherlock’s e-mail account is synchronised with his phone, so Quentin’s contact details might be on it. There must be something.

When John arrives at 221B for the second time that day and rings the doorbell, he’s panting more heavily than that poor sod who came to them the day Sherlock was whisked off to Buckingham Palace in nothing but a sheet. It seems though that the desperation is making him think quicker – when Quentin answers the door, he’s not even surprised. It figures. The trap has been set for Sherlock; of course Quentin had to be left behind.

“Do you know where Sherlock is?” John blurts out, not wasting time with a greeting.

“On a case. None of your–”

“It’s a trap.” John tries to calm down, they’re practically on the street. He lowers his voice. “The investigation is a trap. Janine set it up.”

Quentin’s eyes sharpen and he grabs John by the elbow, dragging him unceremoniously through the door and closing it behind him.

“Janine Hawkins?”

John blinks, eyes accommodating to the dim light in the hallway. He nods. “She’s connected to Moriarty. I think she used to be pretty close to him.”

Quentin doesn’t doubt him. He keeps his questions short, focused. “How do you know?”

“I talked to her earlier and she let something slip– she used a particular turn of speech – something that very few people could know. It came from that big bombing case of ours, the Game with Moriarty. Sherlock would remember it, I would, maybe Lestrade – I don’t know if the phone calls from the hostages were transcribed into the police reports. But no-one else would know it unless they knew Moriarty at the time.”

A small frown appears on Quentin’s forehead. “Is she aware of her slip?”

John opens his mouth, then closes it abruptly when he realises another thing. “Hell, she might be. She probably did it on purpose! She knew I wouldn’t be able to warn him, she must have done something to his phone.”

“Damn,” Quentin swears. “Of course. That’s why our man didn’t report...” He trails off and fishes out his phone, starting to speed-type texts to various numbers.

“Mary disappeared,” John volunteers after a few moments of silence. “Left me a note saying she’s out with Janine. Which can’t be true because–”

“Miss Hawkins should currently be at work in her office at CAM Global News where she works as a PA of the newspaper owner, Charles Augustus Magnussen.” Quentin pockets his phone and pays attention to his watch, fiddling with the buttons. It seems to John that he’s setting up a timer. “Will chose today to visit her, using their relationship to make her let him in and search through Magnussen’s office.”

“Except that Janine picked the day. She knows he’s coming. She knows why. I thought he was leading her on but it’s the other way round!”

Quentin has the nerve to chuckle even though it’s a dry, humourless sound. “If I’m not very much mistaken, your missing wife is there too. Magnussen is the one blackmailing her but it looks like it might be Hawkins who is orchestrating it.”

John feels dread at the idea of Mary backed into a corner, and Sherlock feeling so secure in his scheme that the revelation will be like a blow to the head, shattering his plans to pieces.

“I’m going there.”

Quentin smirks. “You won’t even get through the first security level.”

“Then _you_ get me through it!” John shouts.

Quentin regards him for a second without any answer and then John hears the sound of a car pulling up to the kerb in front of 221B.

“Our ride,” Quentin says and John doesn’t miss the _our_. He lowers his eyes in a silent _thank you_ , goes out of the door and gets into the car.

He barely has time to settle in the seat when Quentin turns to him and says, “You will give me your gun.” It’s not even a question, merely a statement. John bristles.

“Like hell I will.” He’s not about to wander into a dangerous situation completely–

“The gun, Captain, now.”

His hand moves for the gun as if of its own volition. John blinks. He hasn’t experienced this sort of bypass of his own will, this pull of a command that can circumvent his conscious mind and fire up neural circuits drilled into him in the Army, since he was discharged.

“Bloody hell,” he says quietly. “Who _are_ you?”

Quentin takes the gun and tucks it into his pocket. “Lieutenant colonel, SAS. Before I was drafted by MI6. Work in civvies is more fun, and besides, Iraq was getting bloody awful.”

“You tell me,” John remarks wryly. “But I’d still be more useful to you armed.”

“We’re heading into a situation involving your wife, a man of considerable power who is threatening her, and a man for whom you have feelings that aren’t giving the word ‘conflicted’ proper justice.” Quentin shakes his head decisively. “I don’t trust you when it comes to shooting, John.”

John clenches his jaw. “You don’t think I’d make the right decision?”

Quentin doesn’t have Sherlock’s scrutinising gaze but his full focus is no less intimidating.

“For one thing, I doubt you’d make a decision at all. You’ve certainly avoided making a decision up to now. You’re still trying to have everything – Mary and Will, wife _and_ friend. Even though it should be clear to you by now that you can’t have both.”

After a pause, his voice loses some of its sharp edge. “For another, there’s usually no such thing as the right decision in shooting people. You know that.”

“Yeah, I know.” Images of an Afghani village, rags-clad women ghosting over the main road, mute and abandoned in their mourning, pop up in John’s mind. War widows. Every enemy soldier is someone’s son, husband, or father.

*

London passes behind the windows of their car a lot faster than John is used to even with the most reckless cabbies. They barely slow down on the crossroads and it occurs to John that someone must be controlling the traffic lights to give them a smooth passage. It doesn’t take long and the view out of the windows starts to get obscured by their own reflection. The sun will be setting soon and the sky is dark-grey under the clouds.

Quentin is busy texting.

After some minutes, John can’t hold back his curiosity any more. “Why do you call him that? _Will_?”

Quentin does a one-shoulder shrug, eyes on his phone. “It’s his name.” Another message sent. He pockets the phone and rubs his hands. “He asked me to,” he adds.

“But...” It doesn’t make sense. That name is so ordinary, so unlike Sherlock... “I thought he _liked_ Sherlock. Being Sherlock Holmes.”

Somewhat unexpectedly, Quentin smiles. “You, John, do an admirable job of convincing yourself that you don’t know him well enough when in fact, you know him better than anyone.”

“And what’s _that_ supposed to mean?” John has had about enough of these cryptic pronouncements but his anger falls on deaf ears. Quentin doesn’t answer for the rest of the ride.

At the CAM Global News building Quentin sends John to fetch two coffees and when they meet again in the foyer, Quentin takes one of the security guard’s key cards out of his pocket.

“Don’t ask how. It would make you an accomplice.”

They use one of the standard lifts that gets them as far as the floor below Magnussen’s office and private quarters. The open space office is already empty, lit only by the illumination from nearby buildings. Orange status lights on the sleeping computer screens around the room glow from the semi-darkness. Quentin points to the door at the far end of the corridor with a white-green sign above it. Emergency Exit.

“That staircase is the standard fire escape for all the floors below us. The quarters above us, Magnussen’s office and his penthouse flat, are accessible only by a private lift controlled by Magnussen’s key card _or_ by the staircase, with the addition of a security system that will sound the alarm if someone tries to open the door and go upstairs.”

“Then how do we get up?”

Quentin looks at his watch and mutters under his breath. John realises he’s counting down. Then he grabs the handle and opens the door in time with a loud _pop_ of electronic switches followed by a few seconds of silence, and then bleary blue-white fluorescent emergency lights blink to life on the darkened ceilings.

“Power outage,” John observes wonderingly.

“And a simultaneous hacker attack on the security system,” Quentin grins. “Chop chop, John, we’ve only got two minutes.”

Magnussen’s office appears to be empty. Quentin goes ahead with a perfunctory search while John lingers near the stairwell leading up to the penthouse. He can hear a faint echo of voices from upstairs, words unintelligible but the tone definitely agitated, and he’s about to point it out to Quentin when the man bends down to the unconscious body of a guard lying face down in one of the corners.

“John,” he whispers, “can you–”

John doesn’t hear the rest of the sentence. Out of the scraps of dialogue from upstairs, one word has just stood out clearly. A name. _Mary_.

He runs up the stairs, through a hall and ends up in front of a closed door. From the room behind it he can hear muffled voices, Janine’s bright and cheerful, Mary’s clearly distressed. Sherlock’s deep register comes through with startling clarity; he must be standing closest to the door. The fourth voice has a heavy foreign accent that John doesn’t recognise. He’s about to press his ear against the door and listen when he hears his wife speaking, her tone trembling and seemingly on the verge of tears.

“I’m sorry, Sherlock. I truly am.” 

John doesn’t think. He throws his weight through the door and into the line of the bullet he somehow _knew_ would be flying this way and when it hits him, it doesn’t even hurt.

 

**_Two_ **

Sherlock can’t speak, can’t react, and yet, at the periphery of his attention, his brain takes notice of everything.

Mary seems to be frozen to the spot. Magnussen looks shocked. Definitely nauseous. Apparently, having the guts of a filthy blackmailer doesn’t equip you enough for the sight of real blood seeping into your expensive carpet. Janine is laughing, triumph written all over her face.

“And that’s my job done. Whatever happens now–” she gestures between Sherlock and Mary, “–you two are finished. Alive or dead, Sherlock – you’ll know that Jim won in the end.” 

She blows him a mock-kiss and leaves the room. There is nothing Sherlock would want to do to stop her, not with John Watson dying in his arms.

Then he lifts his head and narrows his eyes at Mary.

“You couldn’t have hurt me more if you had killed me.”

“I only wanted a chance,” her voice breaks on every word. “All I wanted, a simple quiet life – didn’t I deserve a chance?”

“Did you ever give a chance to the people you were sent to kill?” Sherlock shouts, his rage sudden and overwhelming and Mary recoils, waking from her stupor. She wipes the tears from her eyes, her expression hardening.

“It’s your fault,” she says savagely. “If you’d only listened–”

Her fingers tighten around the gun and she lifts it once more, aiming at him. Not his heart this time, he’s kneeling already, it will be an execution shot. John squirms, he opens his mouth for something but only blood flows out and he can only watch as Mary starts to pull the trigger–

The striker never clicks and yet there’s a soft _ping_ of a silenced shot. Mary opens her mouth on a surprised exhale, wavers, and falls forward, a single red spot in the back of her skull.

 

**_Twenty minutes earlier_ **

Sherlock is a bit surprised when he steps out of the private lift into Magnussen’s office and there’s no sign of Janine. Where is she – powdering her nose or whatever it is women do when they are about to be proposed to? It’s slightly insulting but for the moment, entirely irrelevant. The leather seat in the office is still warm, there’s a trace of perfume in the air that doesn’t belong to Janine, and most importantly, a security man with a bleeding wound on his temple is lying on the floor in the corner by the window.

Someone else has broken in here, and Magnussen is not out as he was supposed to be.

Sherlock checks his phone. No updates on the situation, no report of any change. The last text he received came this morning, a field agent reporting that John Watson left his home early. Nothing since then. It’s odd. A glitch in their plan of such magnitude as Magnussen changing his evening schedule should not have passed unnoticed. That’s what happens when you leave the legwork to Mycroft and his people, Sherlock snorts to himself and then he freezes.

His hearing, already fine and sharpened by apprehension, picks up the sounds of a muffled conversation coming from upstairs. He climbs the stairs, his feet silent on the carpeted floor as he slowly approaches the door. He holds his breath and listens.

“What do you think you’re doing?” A man’s voice, domineering and condescending. That must be Charles Augustus Magnussen.

“I’m quitting, is that clear?” A woman’s voice replies and an electric jolt of surprise runs through Sherlock’s spine. He knows this voice. It’s Mary Watson. “I’m done.” She sounds resolute, and a little desperate.

“I’m not done with you.”

“Look, I did everything you wanted. You told me to take the job, I took the bloody job. You told me to look out for Holmes, I did. And I nearly broke my back trying to keep the door open for him and John but they wouldn’t reconcile, not ever, and now I’m starting to lose John and that was never–”

“You aren’t trying hard enough,” Magnussen says. “There are ways to keep a man. I can imagine that a child would–”

“I’m not a fucking brood mare,” Mary growls.

Sherlock chooses this moment to open the door and enter. If Magnussen is surprised to see him, he does an admirable job of hiding it. Mary, on the other hand, spins around like a snake, the gun in her gloved hand trained on the intruder even before she recognises him and when she does, she gasps.

“Is John with you?”

Sherlock lifts one corner of his mouth in a cynical sneer. “As you so aptly put it, we refused to reconcile. John is supposed to be at home, with you.”

Mary straightens but doesn’t relax, she lowers the gun but doesn’t tuck it away. Her gaze goes back to Magnussen who is sitting in a chair as if he’s enjoying a Shakespearean drama and wasn’t staring down a barrel just a minute ago. Mary’s tone gains a threatening edge. “I wasn’t planning on having witnesses tonight, Sherlock.”

“Well, I wasn’t planning on having company either,” Sherlock replies nonchalantly. “Heads will be rolling at MI6 after my brother learns how you gave his people the slip.”

Mary smirks. “Those people are a bunch of amateurs. I shook them off after the second corner.”

“Dear me, Mary, you should give them more credit,” another voice drawls from the door to the adjoining room and Janine comes in, stopping next to Magnussen and sitting down on the arm of his chair. She puts her arm along the top of the backrest and crosses her legs comfortably. Sherlock doesn’t miss the way Magnussen leans slightly away from her as if afraid of even an accidental touch. Interesting.

“You see, I wanted so badly for you to come here that I had to deal with them,” Janine finishes and smiles. Then she turns her face to Sherlock.

“Sorry about the engagement. Not interested. Though the ring looked lovely. Nice to see you taking a disguise seriously.”

“Well, in for a penny...” Sherlock remarks more for the sake of saying anything at all. His brain is still busy rearranging his theories in the light of this new revelation.

“You?” Mary finds her tongue at last. “What are you–”

“Oh, that’s obvious,” Sherlock puts in impatiently. He looks at Janine. “You’re not really his PA.” He gestures to Magnussen, who briefly closes his eyes in smug amusement.

“Miss Hawkins is actually a very good PA,” he admits. “Shame she wouldn’t stick to the job.”

Janine beams. “See? I’m a terribly good organiser, Sherlock. You should have seen the Watsons’ wedding. And look at you tonight – all my puppets in place and on time. Though I should have added an extra string to your jaw, Mary. You’re going to catch flies.”

Mary pales in anger. “You played me!”

“Isn’t that the pot calling the kettle black?” Janine laughs. “It’s been fun watching you trying to make me like you. I thought nothing could top your grovelling to make me your Chief Bridesmaid – and then Sherlock here started courting me. Honestly!” She shakes her head at him.

Sherlock thinks rapidly. It’s as clear as day now that Magnussen’s interest in him was only bait. It made no sense for him to go after Mycroft – his blackmailing business and MI6 have been on mutually beneficial terms for years. Aloud, he says, “It’s you – you’re the one behind it all. What do you want?”

“Oh Sherl, can’t you tell by now?”

 _You told me to look out for Holmes_ , Mary had said. Oh. So Sherlock has been right after all.

“It was your idea to put Mary into John’s clinic while I was gone. She was ordered to watch out in case I wasn’t dead after all and tried to contact him.”

Mary says quietly as if to herself: “I thought after two years I was safe.”

“You worked for Moriarty,” Sherlock concludes, raising his eyebrows at Janine.

“With!” she corrects him sharply. “Yeah, I worked with Jim. I am good at organising, aren’t I? He was the genius but who do you think was actually getting the shit done?”

“You could have had me taken down in the middle of the street any day,” Sherlock says, careful to sound bored. It will buy him time. “Why this theatre?”

“Oh, I had standards to keep up, Sherl. After all, Jim made it quite clear what he wanted to do to you.”

 _Burn the heart out of me_.  

“John is not here,” he says before he realises he’s speaking aloud.

“Terribly inconvenient, isn’t it?” Janine pulls a rueful face. “You’ve been a naughty boy, Sherlock. You were supposed to be sorry for dying in front of John, and he was supposed to forgive you, and then I could have had you both here. Good job I’ve always got a plan B.”

Sherlock can already see what the plan is. Mary is here tonight for a reason.

“To think I spent two years cheating death for this,” Sherlock shrugs, contempt on the last word. “You’re not even original.”

“That was Jim’s problem – he always wanted things to be clever,” Janine muses. “It backfired in the end. Let’s keep it simple. I believe you know the tune already.”

_Your friends will die if you don’t._

“Wait,” Mary says. She, too, can see where this is going, she just doesn’t have Sherlock’s experience. “What makes you think I’ll shoot him when you tell me to?”

Janine just looks at Sherlock pointedly, prompting him to answer for her. Sherlock rolls his eyes.

“Because there’s an assassin trained on John, if I’m not mistaken.”

“The very best one.” Janine laughs again. “Here’s the deal, Mary. Kill Sherlock, and I won’t harm a hair on John’s head. Kill me or Charles, and you don’t even get the chance to say goodbye to him. I doubt the CIA would let you out of prison for his funeral.”

Mary’s face is unreadable. She has retreated into herself, her pale face distant and calculating.

Sherlock knows she will shoot him in the end. She loves John, not as much as she loves herself but well enough. It’s a comforting thought, in a way. John will have someone who would literally walk over cold corpses for him.

Then an idea flickers in his brain. He has studied Mary’s records, he knows how good a shot she is. She could shoot him in such a way that it would incapacitate him, prolonging the dying process, so that if he died he could be revived in time after Janine and Magnussen disappeared and the ambulance arrived. Is she thinking the same? Is that the calculation that’s passing behind her ice-cold eyes? Or will she settle for the certainty of a direct kill, not risking John’s life by trying to fool Janine with a lot of blood from an entry wound just far enough from the heart not to be fatal?

Mary is still hesitating. Sherlock has to give her time to think.

“Moriarty’s empire is scattered,” he says to Janine. “You won’t be able to stitch it back together, even with me out of the way.”

“You think I wouldn’t waste my talents on petty revenge?” She laughs again, and it’s a bitter sound this time. “Oh I would. I hate you, Sherlock Holmes. Jim and I were perfectly okay before you came along and he became... obsessed with you. He didn’t care for the job, he didn’t care for... not even for himself. Her voice turns venomous. “”You stole him from me.”

“This won’t bring him back,” Sherlock says softly.

“I know.” Janine tilts her head contemplatively. “But I can give him one last present. Send you to join him in Hell.”

Suddenly, with a soft _pop_ , the lamp on the table goes out. Magnussen jumps and Sherlock blinks. Power outage? Tactical advantage? No. The room is not really dark, there’s enough light coming through the windows, the city never sleeps and the cloudy sky is reflecting its lights in a faint yellowish glow. Janine clicks her tongue and checks her watch, tilting her hand to the window to get a better look at the dial.

“Oh, look at the time. They’re later than I thought.”

Magnussen grows restless. “This is getting tedious. I believe I’m no longer needed–”

Janine pushes his shoulder firmly back into the chair. “Stay a little longer, Charles. It’s educational.”

Sherlock has always compared Magnussen to a shark. Now he has a clear idea about how it looks when a shark is scared.

“Sorry about dinner, Sherlock,” she adds after a moment, her light tone back. “The party’s over. Mary, be a love and shoot him.”

“MI6 is raiding the building,” Sherlock tells Mary quietly. “You won’t be able to escape.”

“What would you do in my place?” she asks him, not really waiting for the answer. She knows what happened on the roof of Bart’s. She knows that Sherlock was in a similar position to the one she’s in now – and that he chose to kill himself to protect John. But he managed to fake it in the end, and Sherlock wonders if this is her message to him – _I will fake your death. I won’t shoot to kill._

She lifts her gun. “I’m sorry, Sherlock,” she says and he knows she means it. “I truly am.”

Sherlock closes his eyes and she fires. He hears the soft _bang_ , muffled by a silencer, he hears the door burst open and someone crying out but– he opens his eyes in confusion– the door banged _first_ , and why is he not hurting when the shot’s been fired and what’s this crumpled form in front of him–

“Didn’t I tell you I had my best assassin on him?” Janine says in the distance and Sherlock’s heart turns to ashes.

He falls to his knees and takes John into his arms. Blood is spilling out of the small wound in John’s chest, too close, too close to his heart. He looks for a pulse, for pupil reaction. John is going into shock. Sherlock keeps calling his name and John is grinning and saying something, and this can’t be real, it’s a hollow dream and Sherlock is surrounded by vacuum and the rest of the universe could have imploded and time could have stopped because John is dying.

****

**_One_ **

It’s the shock, that’s why it doesn’t hurt, John knows. Maybe every pain is psychosomatic in the end, because he always remembered that getting shot in the shoulder had hurt like hell. Maybe he just suggested the pain into his memories afterwards, when he woke up in the field hospital, just like he suggested the limp into his damned leg.

But it’s fine, everything is fine. Sherlock is going to live and John has made the best bloody decision of his life and he doesn’t have to live with any more failures.

He coughs, clearing the blood from his throat enough to speak. Sherlock presses his hands on the wound.

“John, listen, don’t speak, don’t move, just breathe, do you hear me, don’t die, John–”

“Sherlock,” John groans and coughs again, “there’s something... I should say... I’ve meant to, always... I might as well... now.”

He feels something wet on his cheek. Oh, he never believed that he would live to see the day when anything could make Sherlock Holmes cry. Irony.

“Don’t say it,” Sherlock whispers, “just don’t, I couldn’t–”

John takes a gurgling breath. “I’m sorry I never asked you what your middle name was.” He spends the rest of his breath on a giggle, hoping that Sherlock will understand. Sherlock, who dedicated weeks of prying to find out John’s middle name while he didn’t bother to remember Lestrade’s first one. He should know what John is _actually_ saying. _You are special. I love you._ It’s never too late to learn Sherlock-speak, John thinks and then he closes his eyes.

It’s all fine.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "You will give me your gun."


	9. Epilogue

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sherlock comes to understanding.

_I’m sorry I never asked you what your middle name was._

“You always knew it.”

The voice is familiar, deep, caught somewhere between weariness and impatience. John replays it in his head a few times, a pleasant loop of warm words in a mist devoid of sensations. He’s floating, disconnected from his body, he couldn’t move if he tried and right now he most emphatically doesn’t want to, and he concludes that perhaps this is a dream. An odd dream, since his dreams were always mute, that was the horror of it, silent explosions and people screaming without sound, maybe that’s why Sherlock’s violin always succeeded in easing him out of the nightmares. But now he hears a voice, and what’s more, the owner of that voice seems to be arguing with him, and John decides that this dream is funny enough to be dreamt a little longer.

“My middle name. You always knew it, you idiot. It’s _William Sherlock_ Scott Holmes, the whole lot of it.”

_Jesus. I lived with you eighteen months without even knowing your firstname?_

John snorts in amusement and the dream escapes from under his eyelids. He opens his eyes and his exhale immediately catches on a curse. Bad idea.

The room is unbearably bright, the whiteness of the walls only enhancing the glaring effect that makes John’s head go dizzy. His peripheral nervous system, so comfortably absent during his sleep, finally makes itself present over the morphine that John can now recognise as a dulling background presence at the bottom of his consciousness, and various pains and aches slam into him with the intensity of a freight train.

He groans, the sound rasping on his throat that feels as if it’s lined with sandpaper.

“Christ, what happened?!”

“The short version?” Sherlock, plonked down on a hard hospital chair in a ball of crumpled coat and wild hair and staring out of the window as if it conceals the solutions of all the unsolved murders in London for the past decade, shudders minutely in a silent laugh.

“You’re not dead.”

“I have been,” John realises.

Sherlock still appears to be laughing though from what John can see from his face his expression is far from one of mirth.

“You were right. It’s a horrible joke.”

John grins against the pull of the too dry skin on his lips. “Finally getting my point, are you?”

He attempts to lift his head but barely manages a glimpse of the bandages wound tightly around his chest like white armour. Christ, a simple gunshot wound shouldn’t require a dressing like that.

Sherlock continues speaking in a colourless voice, still gazing out of the window. “You went without a pulse for four minutes, twenty two seconds. After the ambulance arrived they kicked you back online but it was touch and go the whole night. You’ve been in an induced coma and on machine ventilation until yesterday when your lungs finally decided that breathing was worth the trouble.”

His tirade feels like an accusation and John deflects it with a sarcastic chuckle. “Terrible of me being such an inconvenience.”

“Four minutes and twenty two seconds, John!”

“Two years, Sherlock!”John rasps back when he really would rather shout but that is out of the question now. Sherlock chooses that moment to finally look directly at him and John’s breath hitches, his rage coming to a halt together with the words on his dry tongue.

Sherlock’s eyes are the most wrecked thing John has ever seen. They’re like stained glass cathedral windows that someone smashed to pieces before burning down the church, priceless works of art and pristine beauty of the sanctuary desecrated and vandalised into a pile of charred ruins. They are the eyes of a man who didn’t cry, not once in those days John lay in a coma, and the unshed tears were flowing inwards and eating out his flesh from inside like acid until everything left of him was a hollow shell.

“Felt like it,” Sherlock remarks, shifting his gaze back to the window.

“Yeah, I think it did, in a way,” John acquiesces. He knows how fast Sherlock’s brain works, like a rocket compared to vapid ponds of stagnant water, the minds of ordinary people. Four minutes must have felt like an eternity to him.

“I’m sorry,” Sherlock says after a moment.

_“What?”_

“Not for jumping,” Sherlock adds hastily and John can’t help the way the corners of his mouth twitch. He would have giggled if it didn’t hurt so fucking much.

“For your ribs,” Sherlock explains. “I might have broken two or three of them.”

“Ah.” That explains the bandages. John clears his throat and winces at the painful reminder of the intubation. “That often happens with CPR,” he remarks. Silence stretches between them, the blanket of morphine over John’s senses heavy and comfortable but the air in the room laden with tension that begins to itch on his skin like a noxious gas.

“I may regret saying this,” he begins carefully, “but I’m glad you weren’t sorry for... the other thing. I keep thinking if you weren’t so magnificently stubborn about the whole business _you_ would have ended with a bullet in your chest.”

“Better me than you,” Sherlock sighs and John rolls his eyes.

“You’re _still_ not getting it, Sherlock?”

His friend – no, not only that, not any more – turns a genuinely lost look towards him. John takes as deep a breath as the bandages allow him.

“You can’t – If we ever – If there’s a chance at anything between us, this making sacrifices business has to stop. It mustn’t be about who dies for who.Dying is the easy way out, you leave everything behind and it’s not your problem any more.”

Sherlock is biting his lip but he doesn’t interrupt.

“I don’t want you to die for me, Sherlock. Never wanted you to. I want you to live. For me. Or just with me. Or...” John makes an awkward pause, suddenly unsure of where he now stands with Sherlock. “Or just live. If that’s not too much of a bother for you.”

Sherlock seems to be turning the words inside his own head for a while. At last, he lowers his gaze and nods, a tiny movement that almost gets lost in the collar of his coat. “That’s acceptable.”

“What, accep–” John begins indignantly but he’s interrupted by a creak of the door. Slowly, mindful of the dizzy lump of cotton wool he feels stuffed inside his skull, he turns his head on the pillow to look at the visitor.

Then he briefly wishes he could ignore him.

“I heard voices,” Quentin says by way of an apology, “and Will, you can sputter all you like but there _are_ people outside of your precious self allowed to enter this room, no matter how territorial you’ve been for the past four days.”

Sherlock glares but more people bustle in, doctors and nurses, alerted to John’s waking by the change in heart monitor readings. They begin to ask him who the current Prime Minister is (John can’t help sniggering at the question) and how he would describe his pain on a scale from one to ten (John feels inclined towards eleven). They also bring a bowl full of ice chips and he sucks at them gratefully, well aware that in his state and level of anesthetic in his blood even a glass of water would be too much.

By the time the doctors finally satisfy themselves that the coma seems to have left no lasting brain damage, John’s patience with his professional colleagues is already wearing thin.

“They say that doctors make the worst patients,” Quentin remarks when they’re gone at last. He had tucked himself away at the window during the past few minutes so that he wouldn’t get in the way of the medical personnel and now he has seemingly naturally gravitated to Sherlock’s side, leaning on the backrest of the chair with an air of easy familiarity with Sherlock’s personal space. John’s lips tighten around the ice chip in his mouth and he tells himself sternly that he really shouldn’t be jealous.

“What do I do now?” he asks instead.

Quentin shrugs. “Your wife officially never existed. The marriage is legally invalid. I might have insinuated to Mr. Holmes,” Quentin winks gleefully in counterpoint to Sherlock’s instantly sour expression, “that the least he could do for you was get your paperwork sorted. I hope you understand that there will be no funeral. But – if you want – there’s a grave in Chiswick. Stillborn child, no living relatives. That’s where she got the name. If you want to sprinkle the ashes there, you’d at least have a place to go to... mourn.”

John is taken aback. He didn’t expect this level of insight from a man who practically likened himself to a hangman. In the last seconds before he passed out John knew that he couldn’t go on living with Mary if she did shoot Sherlock. But that doesn’t erase the months he lived with her, the months when he loved her, both before Sherlock’s return and after. Right now he hates her but he knows that the time will come when he will miss her.

“Thank you,” he manages at last. There’s one more thing for which he’s truly grateful to this man but he resolves never to say it aloud. His gun. If John had his gun on him, he might have been the one killing his wife to save his friend. Or Sherlock could have taken it from him and tried to kill Mary in revenge. John isn’t sure if they would ever overcome such a shadow hanging between them.

Quentin smiles to himself as if he can follow the train of thoughts in John’s head and then he turns to Sherlock.

“We had a good thing going, didn’t we?”

“No, we didn’t.” Sherlock’s face softens with something John has so rarely seen there that he has trouble identifying it right away. It’s simple affection, self-confessed, not hidden, and already at peace with its inevitable end. 

“No, we didn’t,” Quentin agrees, lifting one of Sherlock’s hands to brush his lips against the knuckles. Sherlock doesn’t shy from the intimate touch, his usual sociopathic shields dropped. He seems to relish human contact as much as anyone else and John realises he has never treated Sherlock this gently since he returned. Shame prickles hot in his throat and he chases it away with a sharp bite on another chip. The ice grinds between his teeth with a loud crack and Quentin lets go of Sherlock’s hand, one corner of his mouth tugged in a smirk.

“Take good care of him,” he addresses John as he comes to stop by the bed on his way out. “And keep in mind that I’ll make short work of you if I ever find out that you haven’t.”

“Oh. The last time I had the ‘break his heart and I’ll break your legs’ talk, I was seventeen,” John deadpans.

Sherlock chuckles. “Isn’t Poland a bit remote for such things?”

“Oh, about that.” Quentin flashes them a wide grin. “With the recent development in Ukraine, our operatives in Eastern Europe are being relocated. I, for one, have been transferred home. Some wire-tapping business in South-EastLondon. There’s a lady with exceptionally sharp hearing eavesdropping on state secrets – by the way, Will, can I nick that engagement ring you bought for Janine? Just because you’re hopeless at seduction doesn’t mean the tactic won’t work for me.”

At last, Quentin leaves and John lets out a whooshing breath.

“I think I really should be glad he’s gone,” he remarks after a while.

Something sparkles in Sherlock’s eyes. “Were you jealous?”

John rolls his eyes. “As you no doubt intended me to be, yes, I was bloody jealous. But he basically saved your life so I’m trying to be decent about him...” John sighs. “Oh, sod it, I _am_ jealous. He’s bloody perfect.”

“Is he?”

“Don’t pretend you don’t know. He’s so...” John waves his hand in the direction of the door that closed after Quentin a moment ago, “tall and fit and dazzling and competent and I bet he doesn’t even have bad days. He’s a much better match for you than...” John trails off before he embarrasses himself any further. Sherlock is looking at him with both eyebrows raised.

“He was captured once, in Chechnya. Terrorist group.” Sherlock looks at the ceiling, keeping his voice level as if he’s reading a mission report. “After MI6 extracted him, his right cheekbone had to be replaced with titanium and most of the skin on his ribs and sides had to be transplanted.”

John recalls the small pink scar he’d noticed near Quentin’s ear. At the time, he thought that the secret agent had had facial surgery to change his appearance. John shudders and tries not to imagine what kind of injuries could have necessitated such treatment. Sherlock catches his reaction and turns his gaze back to the window, something sad and resigned creeping into the lines around his eyes. “Neither he nor I are perfect, John. We were both damaged.”

“I have a scar, in case you’ve forgotten.”

Sherlock’s mouth is turned down. “Yours is for being a good doctor. For bravery under fire. Mine is for stupidity. I let myself be caught–”

John doesn’t let him finish. “Your brother told me once that bravery was a polite word for stupidity. I think that disobeying a direct order falls well into that category.”

Silence stretches between them and Sherlock doesn’t seem convinced. John thinks he knows what’s going on in that head, so magnificent and yet so peculiar. He went through the same, after his discharge. Feelings of insecurity, worthlessness, inferiority. It must be a novel experience for Sherlock who was always outstanding and always knew it.

“I’d like to see them,” John ventures after a while. “One day. I’d like you to tell me about them, about your time away. You can talk to me, you know, about anything.” John absentmindedly rubs his shoulder through the bandages. “I never talked about my nightmares but now I wish I had. I’m here, as long as you need me.”

“I don’t need you,” comes the hoarse reply.

John stares ahead of him. Out of the corner of his eye he can see Sherlock’s lipspressed into a thin line. He can feel his face heat. Spurned, before they even started...

“That was the whole point!” Sherlock bursts out, gesturing so wildly that John nearly flinches. “To prove that I can manage without you. That I can get myself an assistant, a flat-mate, that I can work, stay clean, be civil to people, that I can _function_ without you. I don’t _need_ you, John – but I still _want_ you.”

Sherlock breathes rapidly and there are two bright spots of colour on his cheeks. “I don’t want you to stay with me under an excuse. I won’t be the patient to your doctor. You’ve set your rule: no dying for each other.Okay then – now I’m setting mine. No co-dependency. I don’t want you to eat with me because you think I need feeding up, but because you _like_ eating with me. I don’t want you to hide my cigarettes because it’s good for me, but because you hate the smell. Do you understand?”

John understands. _I want to be your choice, not your duty._

It’s a shame, he thinks, that he’s lived for eighteen months with the most observant man on the planet and never let him know how much he loved it. Belatedly he feels ashamed of every long-suffering sigh, every frustrated groan, every exasperated eye-roll he used to pepper their days with, whereas in reality he never wanted to live any other way.

But he finds this difficult, this sort of stuff, talking about his feelings and analysing them aloud, so in the end he settles for a grin and a curt response: “Deal.”

“Deal?” Sherlock repeats, obviously surprised.

“Yeah.” John grins some more. “It’s not always about you, you know.”

Sherlock blinks several times and then his face slowly spreads with an answering smile, a lopsided grin that makes him look twenty years younger and John realises just how much he’s missed seeing this expression ever since Sherlock came back. 

“And I’m still going to be angry with you, at times,” he warns him.

“That’s understandable.” Sherlock tilts his head in mock seriousness. “I’m not about to stop being myself just because I’ve finally become aware that I love you.”

John runs the sentence several times in his head until he gets the implication and his eyes widen. Oh, Sherlock... They really were a pair of idiots.

He smothers another giggle down his throat before his ribs could make him regret it. “Besides, now I’ll have the means to resolve at least some of the frustration.” He waggles a sassy eyebrow at Sherlock who gives him a blank stare.

“I mean, the angry sex,” John prompts and revels in the faint shade of pink that’s spreading over Sherlock’s cheeks – only to be replaced by the tiniest of mischievous smirks. With a start, John realises that it’s rather pointless pretending that he’s keeping his cool when he’s attached to a heart monitor. The beeping speeds up and it’s John’s turn to blush. Hopefully the sodding thing won’t attract another horde of doctors. They could do with a bit of privacy right now.

 

*

 

There aren’t many reasons to get angry, though, in the first weeks after John is released from the hospital and lands back in his old bedroom in 221B Baker Street. They both retract a little, acknowledging their new status but careful to explore it, getting used to each other again. Also, it takes time to recover from the wound, for John’s flesh and bones to knit and mend again and John spends most of his days dozing in his room, its familiarity somewhat disturbed by his old chair that he found inexplicably cluttering up the already tiny space and that Sherlock refused to move back downstairs. Well, John is in no shape to move it alone and so he lets it be. Even though it’s odd.

The first sign he’s getting his strength back comes one night when the sleeping pills he’s been prescribed wear off well before morning and John wakes up shortly after midnight, senses on alert like they haven’t been for years. The curtains in his bedroom aren’t drawn and in the gleams of light coming from the street John can recognise a shape occupying his old armchair. Curled into a tight ball under his dressing gown, Sherlock is sleeping, dark halo of curls resting against the slope of the armrest, his breathing slow and regular with a tiny hiss on every inhale.

“You’re going to catch cold,” John calls softly. Sherlock doesn’t stir but the change in his breathing pattern gives him away. He’s awake.

Without another word, John lifts the corner of his duvet. Equally silently, Sherlock unfurls himself from the chair and slides into the bed, dressing gown and all, solid weight of cool silk and warm flannel of his pyjamas and sleep-liquid limbs wrapping around John’s body as they fall asleep again.

 

*

 

Sometimes John thinks this is all they will ever have, the warmth of a shared bed and sleepy kisses before breakfast and no need to feel awkward when Sherlock comes home exhausted from two days straight on a case and John wants to offer him a massage. Some days it feels almost enough. Sherlock doesn’t push, doesn’t pout; he seems generally content with waiting for John to figure it out. Sometimes, though, John catches himself staring at the curve of Sherlock’s shoulder as he holds his violin and imagining how it would feel under his lips; sometimes, when he kisses the tips of Sherlock’s fingers before going to bed, he has a fleeting impulse to suck them into his mouth, just out of curiosity to see how wide Sherlock’s eyes would go at that. And sometimes, John turns his head just in time to catch Sherlock staring at him with something new and hungry in his eyes, and it’s not a bad feeling, not at all.

One day, maybe one day quite soon, they will look at each other simultaneously and they will know they are both there, all the way there – just the two of them against the rest of the world.

John isn’t afraid of that day. He’s looking forward to it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "Four minutes and twenty two seconds, John!"


	10. Extra: Illustrations

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I drew a little illustration for each chapter of this fic (and put them into End Notes for each chapter); some of them are to my satisfaction, some make me less happy, some are downright silly - there, I am no artist. This fandom is full of amazingly talented artists but sadly, they are nowhere near my fic - and so I have to settle for my own fumbling with pencil, paper, and my smartphone to take pictures of my pictures and for a little adjustment of contrast. 
> 
> As the tenth, one extra illustration, I drew a treat for my beta. She refused to believe that her crush OC, Quentin, would have sailed out of the story all cheeky and unfazed - well. We all have our comedowns. This is how he looks like when he thinks nobody can see him.

 

"I bet he doesn't even have bad days."

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Author's Note:
> 
> Well well. This is the end to the most vexing story that ever came to life in my head. I am amazed and a bit humbled by the discovery of how enthusiastically this piece was received. When I started to write it, I lived under the impression that I was almost alone in my frustration over Season three developments and especially with the way John's character has turned out. To find so many of you coming to tell me in the Comments that the story rang true to you was unbelievably encouraging. 
> 
> I thank you, my readers, for support and for ideas you have been leaving in the Comments. More than once, you have alerted me to another way of reading, to another aspect of characterisation that I didn't notice before, and more than once I used your speculations to further improve the parts of the story that weren't written yet. You have been essential. 
> 
> The greatest thank you for this goes to Ariane DeVere. Not only for her transcripts (without which I wouldn't be able to write a line) and not only for her incomparable beta work (you guys think I can write in English? You should see the drafts...) but most of all for her patience and perseverance. Because Ari likes John more than I do, even after Series three, and I the more a dick I was writing him, the less happy she was with the task. But she didn't give in, didn't let me go, and it's thanks to her this story is fit to see the world. I might be the mother of my stories but she's definitely the midwife:) Thank you so much, Ari. There are only two people in this world I have told them I loved them - with one, I have three children, and with the other, I wrote three of my best fics.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Did you miss me?](https://archiveofourown.org/works/3511820) by [squire](https://archiveofourown.org/users/squire/pseuds/squire)




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